Thinking About The Future Is Meaningless

A few posts back, I wrote a note about something I’d recently seen in one of the all-hands meetings of one of my clients. This financial services company had been in business for a very long time, and moving innovative products and services to market was a huge challenge. Even in good times, this firm was highly risk-averse and frequently fell behind its competitors in providing new customer-friendly experiences. However, senior management was unconcerned since they considered themselves too big to fail. They’d been around 200 years, and they’d be here 200 more, no matter what happened, no matter how technologically advanced, there was still a demand for their services.

Even a landscape analysis of competitors in the financial services space didn’t worry anyone. They noticed that most of these services out there focused on a specific service or set of services — like those that focus on payments (like PayPal and Venmo) or mortgages (Rocket Mortgages) or GreenDot (pre-paid cards and savings accounts) all of their competitors weren’t as profitable as themselves. Additionally, they noted that many of these single-service companies were looking to expand their services to become full service, just like themselves.

Even the rise of cryptocurrency didn’t shake anyone up. The firm’s contacts within governments globally had tipped them off that while most…