Oliver Wyman At The 2018 World Economic Forum

Amid the heaviest snowfall that the WEF Annual Meeting has seen in 20 years, our Financial Services team is on the ground again in Davos this year and will be sharing our forward-looking strategies focused on industry transformation and innovation. Our special sessions cover disruptive business models, new sources of customer value, cyber risk, and resiliency planning for emerging tech risks.

Today’s world is one of revolutions – political, economic, commercial, industrial, social, and cultural. They are impacting individuals, corporations, and societies and causing the rise and fall of industries in just a few years. Our roundtable breakfast explored the new opportunities for disruptive business models created by mega-disruptions, fueled by digitalization and unforeseen acceleration of the innovation cycle. Mega-disruptions are why Amazon does not have a product marketing function. They are why Google changes its logo every day. More importantly for you, they are the untapped assets in your industry that will help you build a new business model that values them. If you don’t, someone else will. Anticipating and responding to mega-disruptions requires new types of responsive organizations that are more humane, authentic, empowering, digital-by-design, and able to cope with hybrid governance models.

By many measures it has been a good year in financial services. However looking to the future there remains a gnawing underlying concern for leaders in the industry: Where is growth going to come from? In particular, what if the new sources of customer value are created outside of the financial services industry in the coming decade? At our annual lunch and roundtable in Davos, business leaders had a chance to explore these questions and debate what actions should be taken to address them.