Digital Ecosystems and Super Apps

Businesses are characterised by digital innovations, fusing the physical, artificial, and biological worlds, affecting societies, industries, and companies with ever-higher speed and intensity. There is no room for traditional strategic thinking in the process of a new world order with new competitive forces and increased uncertainty, where goals are continually changing, and resources must be flexibly reorganised. Established firms will be the losers with old management concepts, linear value chains, and rigid and closed organisational structures. This article explains why the banking industry is ripe for disruption. It introduces a conceptual framework based on a case study research of Chinese juggernauts with highly scalable data and value monetization based on platform business models and super-apps. Our journey from the industrial economy to the digital era opens up new vistas for creating and capturing value for businesses and clients of the next generation. We describe why modern leaders must embrace change, learn from Asia, and develop strategies through the lens of the ecosystem theory. Digital ecosystems focus on clients and data and consolidate goods and services from diverse sectors. We coined the holistic capability to bring together e-commerce, logistics, social media, and financial services as “The Golden Triangle of Digital Ecosystems” To achieve sustainable financial growth, we suggest an agile management approach that takes the digital transformation as a chance and builds upon partnerships to connect with diverse actors—technologically, socially, and culturally