Navigating the Next Generation of Digital Markets: The Power of the Ecosystem Manager
If you’re unfamiliar with the term “ecosystem manager”, this is the post for you. What does it mean and why is it important for the future of digital services? We want to simplify this for our readers.
At its core, the next generation of digital markets, built on open data principles, thrives on trust. It empowers accredited participants to securely share data, fueling the creation of innovative services and more personalized experiences for users. This isn't a brand-new idea; many industries have successfully adopted similar models for large-scale and decentralized data flow. Importantly, the ecosystem manager itself doesn't handle the data. Instead, it's the guardian of the ecosystem, ensuring secure and authorized access and overseeing how all the different players work together smoothly.
Think of the ecosystem manager as the rule-maker and referee, ensuring everyone plays by the same book. It holds participants (like financial institutions and other service providers) accountable to a common set of standards and policies related to:
Verifying who can participate
Protecting user privacy
Maintaining robust security
Defining clear responsibilities
Ensuring technology systems can talk to each other
The Key to Future Innovation and Differentiation
A standardized ecosystem empowers you to build and launch your own unique commercial offerings, exactly when and how you want, by providing control over data access. Instead of complex, one-off connections, these standards create ease of interoperability, and the agility needed to bring new products to market quickly. By implementing point-to-point trusted frameworks, financial institutions can enhance security, maintain complete data ownership, and drive strategic innovation – a significant advantage over relying on black-box aggregators.
Direct API connections within this framework enable secure, consent-driven data sharing, reducing compliance risks and eliminating vulnerabilities associated with third-party intermediaries. This ensures financial institutions retain complete control over authentication, authorization, and encryption, simplifying regulatory compliance while deepening customer trust.
The Strategic Advantage of Managing Your Own Ecosystem
Beyond security and control, an ecosystem manager fosters exclusive, bilateral partnerships with fintech and other third-party providers (TPPs). This allows financial institutions to co-develop proprietary, value-added services tailored to specific needs, rather than being limited to commoditized solutions offered by aggregators.
The business agility and scalable fintech integration required to truly maximize these opportunities should not be dependent on the technology pipelines of third-party aggregators. Managing your trusted ecosystem is central to scaling multiple accredited bilateral partnerships and unlocking unique value. Once the ecosystem manager confirms these standards are met, data flows directly between the entities providing and receiving it, giving them the power to innovate freely and strategically. This approach minimizes technical headaches and fosters rapid growth and efficient collaboration.
Learning from Global Leaders
The proof, as they say, is in the pudding. Leading global financial institutions are already demonstrating the business case for open data:
Singapore: DBS Bank
($608 billion in Assets)
Recognizing the need to cater to digital natives, DBS embarked on a journey to become digitally driven. Their CEO, Piyush Gupta, emphasized acting like a technology startup to deliver effortless banking. This involved building a scalable API platform, now boasting 1,000 open APIs across 20 categories. By focusing on customer experience, API growth, and partner integration, DBS reduced integration time from months to days, achieved over $100 million in additional API partner revenue, and attained an impressive cost-to-income ratio of 40%. Their experience underscores how a well-managed API ecosystem fuels innovation and efficiency.
Spain: BBVA
($802 billion in Assets)
BBVA understood that embracing open banking required a fundamental mindset shift. By proactively developing their open banking capabilities as part of a broader digital transformation, they achieved remarkable results. This included new revenue streams from API monetization (with 30% of new customer acquisitions through APIs and over 50 new revenue-generating API products), a 93% reduction in customer onboarding time, increased customer lifetime value, and a 75% decrease in partner integration time. BBVA’s strategy of developing APIs and creating collaborative ecosystems with fintech partners highlights the potential for new customer acquisition and the creation of tailored solutions. Their launch of BBVA Market APIs in January 2025 further demonstrates their commitment to leveraging their open banking infrastructure for direct commercial offerings.
Built for Growth
A model built around an ecosystem manager is ideally positioned for rapid growth in data-sharing environments. With consistent technology and policies in place, participants only need to onboard once to seamlessly connect with anyone else in the network – a "connect-once" capability. This dramatically speeds up the time it takes to launch new innovations and services while keeping costs down. The rapid expansion of open finance in Brazil, reaching over 800 participants in under two years, showcases the potential of this framework.
Embedded Services and Agile Utilities
The future of digital services, including what we traditionally think of as "banking," is about embedding services directly into user experiences, fostering agility, and creating essential utilities. The significant advantage of our ecosystem approach is its ability to underpin this business model transformation – something a traditional outsourced aggregator simply can't deliver. We provide the foundational layer for building interconnected services and creating new value streams, with the control and customization that point-to-point frameworks enable.
The Bottom Line
The ecosystem manager is the critical piece for open data, establishing and enforcing clear standards for secure communication, robust security, and strict data privacy. It acts as a trusted facilitator, verifying the eligibility of participants and ensuring adherence to ecosystem rules, without directly handling the data itself. This framework, built on the principles of direct, trusted connections, provides the essential foundation for building powerful data-sharing networks that drive innovation, personalization, and strategic differentiation in financial services. The successes of global leaders like DBS and BBVA serve as compelling examples of the potential of this approach.
Caspian simplifies the journey into this new era. Our robust platform manages the entire data-sharing process, supporting both data providers and receivers with seamless data flow. FDX-compliant, secure, and ready to connect locally or globally, we are a leader in providing end-to-end solutions for the next generation of digital markets. Contact us to explore how we can help you navigate this exciting future and build a differentiated strategy.
