Your biggest competitor may have already launched, you've just never heard of them

Early in my career I worked at Telecom during a period when the internet was beginning to reshape communications. It was an exciting time because everyone knew something significant was happening, but very few people understood where it would eventually lead. The prevailing view was that we would compete, adapt and ultimately win. Then came the mobile revolution. Not long after that, cloud computing changed enterprise technology forever.

Looking back, I don't think we underestimated the technology itself but we did underestimate what it would mean for the business model. We spent a great deal of time thinking about how to protect the business we already had rather than positioning ourselves for the business that was emerging. Cannibalisation felt like the greatest threat; and growth came second.

That isn't unusual. Most successful organisations are built around products, services and ways of working that have delivered years of success. The instinct is to optimise what already exists. The problem is that disruptive technologies rarely reward businesses for defending the past. They reward those prepared to rethink it.

The organisations that win don't always play the existing game

I was reminded of that recently while reading about China's rise in electric vehicles…

Twenty years ago, China recognised it wasn't going to beat Western manufacturers at the internal combustion engine. Companies such as Toyota, Volkswagen and Ford had decades of engineering expertise, mature supply chains and global brands. Trying to catch them by playing exactly the same game was never likely to succeed.

Instead, China chose a different path. It made a long-term bet on electric vehicles, battery technology and the manufacturing capability needed to support them. At the time this looked risky because electric vehicles represented a tiny share of the market and there was no guarantee they would become mainstream. Yet while many established manufacturers continued refining petrol engines and improving existing platforms, China quietly invested in an entirely different future.

Today the results speak for themselves and Chinese manufacturers are among the world's largest producers of electric vehicles, battery technology has become a strategic advantage and many of the companies that once led the industry are now trying to catch up.

The lesson isn't really about cars but about recognising when the basis of competition is changing.

Banking may be approaching the same moment

I sometimes wonder whether financial services are approaching a similar crossroads.

Banks naturally compare themselves with other banks. They benchmark products, pricing, customer experience and digital capability. But while those things remain important, what if the next generation of competition isn't trying to become a better bank at all? What if it's building entirely different financial infrastructure?

Around the world, new organisations are emerging with assumptions that would have sounded ambitious only a few years ago. They assume settlement should happen in minutes rather than days. They assume markets should operate continuously rather than only during business hours. They assume assets can exist digitally, move globally and be managed through software rather than paperwork.

Most people have never heard of many of these businesses. Some have only launched recently even though several are already processing significant transaction volumes, building their own blockchain infrastructure and attracting users at a pace that would have been difficult to imagine only a few years ago.

Whether every one of those businesses succeeds isn't really the point. The point is that they are competing on a completely different set of assumptions.

This is bigger than cryptocurrency

Whenever this discussion begins, it's tempting to reduce it to a debate about Bitcoin or cryptocurrency. I think that misses the bigger story. The more important change is that financial infrastructure itself is evolving. Money is becoming programmable. Assets are becoming tokenised. Settlement is becoming faster. Processes that once required multiple intermediaries and significant manual effort are gradually becoming automated through software.

We've seen this pattern before. Cloud computing wasn't simply about moving servers into someone else's data centre. It fundamentally changed how organisations bought and consumed technology. In much the same way, programmable finance has the potential to change how capital moves through organisations.

Treasury is becoming a competitive advantage

For decades treasury has largely been viewed as an operational function and its role has been to manage liquidity, reduce financial risk and ensure the business has access to capital when it needs it.

Those responsibilities aren't changing but what is changing is the opportunity. As financial infrastructure becomes more intelligent, treasury is becoming a source of competitive advantage and businesses that can move capital faster, automate treasury processes, improve settlement and deploy capital more efficiently will increasingly operate differently from businesses relying on traditional systems.

That advantage extends well beyond the finance team to influence working capital, international expansion, customer experience and ultimately competitiveness. Increasingly, organisations won't simply compete on the quality of their products or services. They'll compete on how intelligently they manage capital.

Looking beyond today's competitors

History has a habit of repeating itself. The internet didn't replace businesses overnight. Mobile didn't either. Cloud computing certainly didn't. Each technology started quietly before reaching a point where customer expectations fundamentally changed. By then, the organisations that had invested early were operating on entirely different terms.

Financial infrastructure feels like it's entering a similar phase and the question isn't whether blockchain platforms, tokenised assets or digital finance business will succeed. Most won't. It's about whether leaders are spending enough time looking beyond the competitors they already know.

If history teaches us anything, it's this: your biggest competitor rarely arrives looking like your current competitor. They usually arrive looking small, unfamiliar and easy to ignore. Until one day, they aren't.