2022 represents a turning point in Platformable’s growth. While we started as a consultancy-based business about five years ago, we have spent the last year building data products and moving to a more product-oriented approach, and our timing has never been more crucial.

There are four key drivers that demonstrate the importance of Platformable’s mission and approach, and 2022 will see us emerging from a pseudo-stealth mode where we didn’t focus on sharing our products and approaches so widely, as we were busy building and working with our existing client base.

The four drivers that now impact much of our thinking at Platformable are:

1. Global operational infrastructures are becoming API-enabled

2. Global health and climate challenges will require us all to collaborate in new ways

3. The last year has shown we need new types of businesses and approaches to tech policy 

4. Chatter about web3 threatens to redirect energies from the potential of open ecosystems

1. Global operational infrastructures are becoming API-enabled

Over the past several years (and on turbodrive under COVID), global operations across multiple industry sectors have moved to digital (and often cloud-based) infrastructures that are being connected via APIs. This is occurring in banking and finance, telecommunications, logistics, supply chain management, health, digital government, and other key sectors that we rely on everyday (we expect energy to be next). This move to API-enabled digital infrastructures is global (what I referred to as the “beginning begins in earnest” in the apidays API Landscape's State of the Market Report 2022). This shift to digital infrastructures enables the growth of open ecosystems in which more stakeholders can participate, market imbalances can be prevented, and everyone can co-create their own value. At least, in theory. Our goal at Platformable is to measure the distribution of value in these digital open ecosystems and assist stakeholders to create approaches that solve challenges, expand innovation, reduce inequalities, redress market imbalances and allow participation and inclusion, all while working within resource and energy constraints.

Our program structure has identified four key areas where we want to focus on supporting the development of open ecosystems: banking/finance, health, sustainability, and government. In addition, we recognise and want to support technology providers (such as the API and open source industries), regulators, standards bodies and networks that also work to support open ecosystems. 

We build core assets: taxonomies, data models, policy and regulation observatories, stakeholder maps, and so on. We then create datasets to track how open ecosystems are growing, and we identify best practices that help support open ecosystem growth. We then work with individual organisations to help them leverage data insights, develop strategies, and implement effective action.

2.  Global health and climate challenges will require us all to collaborate in new ways

As we have all seen and experienced over the past two years (and counting), global health challenges have required all of us to work in new ways. I firmly believe that to succeed, every business will need to frame themselves in terms of how they are able to respond to COVID-19 (and future pandemics) and to climate impacts. On one level this might simply mean being able to move to hybrid or remote working models quickly, ensuring that there are digital user journeys in place, or it may mean specifically designing new product features and offerings that recognise the volatility that we all may experience when there is a new variant surge or an extreme weather event. 

At an ecosystem level, health and climate challenges also mean businesses and other organisations will have to work together in new relationships. While industry competition will occur in the marketplace, competitors will also need to collaborate on common industry open standards, for example, in order for new solutions to be able to be built and scaled quickly.

3. New types of approaches to businesses and tech policy are needed 

When global infrastructures finish transitioning to open ecosystems we will need new approaches to business and technology policy. From a business perspective, as noted above, competitors will need to collaborate at times. APIs make new digital business models possible, which might involve revenue-sharing, commission payments, co-marketing strategies, rebates and indirect revenue modelling, and so on. (New digital business models will also increase as carbon accounting rules are applied globally.) At Platformable, based on industry research into digital ecosystem models, we have identified five types of ecosystem relationships:

• Co-create
• Collaborate
• Complement
• Compete
• Coordinate.

Businesses and organisations will need to identify which type of relationship approach to apply to each situation. In our research and client work in banking/finance, health and government, we have found that organisations in these sectors are not yet well equipped to move beyond a competition-type mindset where the goal is to “own” the customer (and the data, and the complete transaction process). 

But COVID has also demonstrated we need new values to underpin our businesses as well. At Platformable, we embed these values into the way we do business. This goes beyond diversity and inclusion in employment. We monitor the businesses and examples we highlight in our trends reports and slide decks to ensure that we are representing diverse ecosystem stakeholders, we explore what open ecosystems mean for traditionally marginalised populations, and we apply an equity lens to technology implementations. 

The truth is we have poor decision-making processes globally that still separate policy and technical roles. In open ecosystems, we need to bring these two sides together more often. For example, in policies we make speak about the need to take an ecosystem approach. APIs are then seen as the technical component that can facilitate ecosystems being built. But APIs are more than just a technical concern: they bring the business/policy and technical sides together to describe how those relationships should be encoded, and speed up the pace of development. If we do not think about the potential impacts of API use, we could be inadvertently introducing solutions that widen inequalities, and that enable those widening inequalities to be entrenched at a faster rate, and a greater scale than previously. (Jennifer Riggins interviewed me for a recent article on The New Stack to explore how Government APIs can address structural inequities, but businesses also need to think through technology implications).

I’m excited to see newer startups like us focusing more on social impact and embedding values into the way we all do business. Incumbent businesses are also reorienting to recognise the need to take a more thoughtful, holistic view of how they operate. At Platformable, our whole team is excited and proud that this is our focus. We all believe that this is a growing phenomenon that moves beyond a ‘winner takes all’ approach to platforms, and instead represents an understanding that our successes are all dependent on each other, and dependent on our users and communities being able to grow and participate fully.

4. Chatter about web3 threatens to redirect energies from the potential of open ecosystems

But while I may be bullish and hopeful about the way Platformable approaches business, I am also worried at how much this first week of 2022 has been taken up already with talk around blockchain, cryptocurrencies and NFTs.

I urge everyone to read Stephen Diehl’s summary of why Web3 is bullshit.

We don’t need web3: open ecosystems in which API-driven infrastructures enable everyone to participate and co-create value are mature and expanding. Platformable’s work (and the work of many others too) is focused on ensuring that open ecosystems enable participation and opportunities for everyone, and that technological solutions can be implemented securely, ethically, equitably, and responsibly. 

I do worry that the amount of focus given to web3, NFTs, and the snow-crashed nightmare vision of a metaverse detracts from the potential of open ecosystems as the solution. I am disappointed to see some thought leaders in APIs, platforms and ecosystems give so much focus to these areas. Where is there a similar sense of urgency in discussing how to leverage open ecosystems to resolve the massively unequal income disparities (and unpaid taxes) that have been generated over the past year alone amongst platforms and digital technologies or in leveraging technologies and ecosystems to get one step ahead of climate crises and the pandemic impacts?

The need for the work of Platformable (and the many others doing similar work) has never been greater, And this year, we are looking forward to doing that work with more clients, partners, colleagues, and competitors.

Here’s what we have been working on this week at Platformable.

Open Ecosystems

• We completed two white papers for two clients.
• We started defining a taxonomy for privacy technology, based, in part, on the work by The Rise of Privacy Tech (TROPT) and other models. (We would adopt TROPT’s model but we need something a little simpler for our forthcoming data collection. Also, we found several of the sub-categories proposed by TROPT are in very early stages of maturity and aren't suited to our data analysis.)

Open Banking/Open Finance

• We updated our value model which describes how value flows from APIs in open banking and open finance ecosystems, and how this value is distributed amongst stakeholders. We will create a new video to share our updated thinking in the coming weeks.

• We updated our fintech taxonomy. There is no global industry-wide fintech classification taxonomy, so we have built our own and ensured that it aligns with other fintech category classification systems that we have come across (but were often from a specific perspective so had not attempted to be a comprehensive description of all potential API-enabled fintech products and services).
• We continued development work on our upcoming API Product Monetization Tool, aimed at supporting banks and fintech to experiment with and define their API product pricing strategies. If you would like to test our prototype, please get in touch.

Challenge

We are looking for more public data on the costs of establishing and maintaining an API product. If you have actual costings or general estimates that you are willing to share on the investments you made to build your first bank or fintech APIs, and how much it costs you to maintain them, we would love to add your formula to our library of costing models that will be part of the tool.

•  We continued to build our datasets ahead of our next trends report launch on 20 January.

What this week’s spat between Starling Bank and Fintech was really about

This week saw a public dispute between Starling Bank and Fintech Founders escalate into an open letter published with 53 fintech signatories calling out Starling Bank CEO Anne Boden who told a UK Treasury Select Committee that open banking has been a failure. Boden apparently focused on bank account switching, which has not been a killer use case offering consumer’s greater choice (one of the key regulatory objectives of open banking in the UK). Fintech founders (which included only 3 women as signatories, reinforcing part of Boden’s point that open banking is not creating new opportunities for consumers, including those who were marginalised in previous, more traditional banking systems) argued that it is still early days, and that API calls from open banking was increasing, demonstrating that there is demand for open banking products and services.

We believe what this public spat really demonstrates is that there is no industry-agreed value model or set of reporting metrics overseen by regulators that monitors whether open banking is generating the benefits that are described in the objectives of open banking regulations, and which are expected to materialise. At Platformable, we use our open banking/open finance ecosystem value model to help us define what metrics to track, and we are seeing that in the UK, the open banking fintech products being created are more often skewed towards high income earners, and are not suited to addressing financial inclusion, for example. We track the products that are being built, women and diverse management of fintech, the business models and pricing strategies, the technologies and standards being used, the targeted end user segments of open banking products, and other data that would help both sides of this debate better identify where value is being generated and where more work needs to be done to ensure open banking ecosystems do not simply recreate a digital version of the previous traditional banking system which did not meet a diverse range of stakeholder needs. As we have argued for over a year now, new open banking fintech solutions, for example, are very poor at meeting the needs of women-owned businesses, for example, and there are limited products addressing the needs of migrant families and households, as another example.

We need regular reporting on a range of metrics including number of API calls being made, the proportion of fintech product users who consent to connect to their bank accounts, the amount of services and products being adopted/used by business type, founder-type, and by key population segments, and metrics that measure financial health to be able to see if open banking is making a difference. We have a list of 10 key metrics we think every regulator should publish to engage more stakeholders in understanding where and when open banking generates benefits, and where it doesn't. We’d love to hear your thoughts on our must-have metrics, reach out and let us know if you would like to participate in our upcoming industry consultation on measuring open banking ecosystem value.

Open Government

• We are currently applying the maturity checklists from the API Framework for Digital Governments to a new client project. We are finding this to be a comprehensive approach to assisting clients define the policy and technical aspects of their API strategy and to identify actions that can help standardise and build cohesiveness for organisation-wide moves towards platform and ecosystem models, particularly within federated organisations that have independent developer teams working in each line of business.

Open Health

• We created a value model to describe how value flows from data, APIs, algorithms and open source technologies in open health ecosystems. This is based on research we have been building over several years, and which also helped inform some of my thinking when I worked with Open Data Institute on a World Health Organization project last year.

• We continued to expand our data systems tracking the open health data ecosystem, ahead of a trends report launch in a couple of months.
• We started wrapping up a client project with a non-profit community health organisation where we helped mentor their program team on data governance practices and helped build their HIV/AIDS program health data governance systems.
• We continued our data governance and stewardship mentoring support client work with a leading equity-focused community health organization in the US.
• We continued work on our data governance product for community health organisations.

Open Sustainability

• We continued work on our value model to describe how value flows from open banking and open finance APIs to help build new sustainability solutions.
• We continued to define our green fintech taxonomy and data models (based on Green Digital Finance Alliance’s Green Fintech taxonomy).

Business Development

• We started planning events in New York City for the week of 22 February. If you would like to meet with me, or hear more about our API product ideation workshop for green fintech, our data governance toolkit for community health organisations, or participate in the launch of our Open Sustainability Green Fintech Report, please get in touch.

It has been an exciting first week of the year at Platformable. I’m proud of our team and how much we have accomplished, the focus of our work, and the respect and enthusiasm we share with our clients. We are completely bootstrapped and have grown to a team of 9, with developer trainees also brought on for paid work through our partnership with MigraCode Barcelona, which creates an early career pathway for refugees, migrants and people from often-marginalised communities looking to break into the tech sector.

Thanks for reading, I’m excited by everything we will be sharing over the coming weeks and months. Please reach out via our calendly link below to discuss more.