Open Question: Can Financial Institutions Be “Everything Everywhere All at Once”?

For many years, the simple mantra of strategic logic has been: choose your fight. Be the orchestrator, the integrator, the infrastructure, or the silent contributor – but never all at once. Focus was the gospel. Scale and specialization were the path to survival.

But what if that’s yesterday’s playbook?

The financial world is being rewired at a structural level. Cloud and APIs have blown apart the cost of integration. AI and autonomous agents are collapsing service and operating models, turning what used to be product verticals into fluid, reconfigurable modules. Regulation – especially in Europe – is not just allowing, but actively forcing access and openness. Add the rise of stablecoins, CBDCs, and DeFi, and the very architecture of money is no longer fixed.

If the rules of the game have changed, do financial institutions still need to choose one role? Or is the old strategic wisdom collapsing under the weight of new technological possibilities?

• As ecosystem orchestrators, banks can dream of dominating customer journeys – owning the interface, curating ecosystems, and monetizing network effects. One way to do that is the ‘Financial SuperApp’. In this role ‘Eco’ is central.

• As traditional integrators, they can still hold control of the value chain, managing risk end-to-end. Partnerships are still essential, but only the ones that support the overall (tech)strategy of the institution. In this role ‘Ego’ is central’.

• As embedded contributors, they can distribute their products invisibly into other ecosystems, scaling without owning the customer. Less ‘Ego’. The institutions will supply other brands/platforms ecosystems.

• As infrastructure providers, they can step back and monetize the rails, the compliance stack, and the liquidity backbone. Much less ‘Ego’. Less exciting, but a position that established institutions excel at, and that might be in high demand.
  

The orthodoxy says: pick one. Reality might say: play them all.

Because the new technology stack does not force a single identity. A bank could be an orchestrator in one vertical, embedded in another, and infrastructure in yet another. The boundaries are porous, the roles interchangeable. Cloud and AI don’t demand focus; they enable multiplicity.

But here’s the dilemma: if everything is possible, does anything matter?

Strategic discipline used to come from scarcity. From hard choices. From trade-offs. Today, the illusion of infinite optionality risks creating institutions that spread widely, but go shallow. A financial institution that tries to be everywhere may end up being nowhere in particular.

The future financial institution may not be defined by which role it plays, but by how deliberately it moves between them. Not fixed identities, but fluid archetypes. Not single bets, but portfolios of roles, tuned by context, geography, and partnerships.

The question is no longer “Which role should we choose?” The question is: Do we dare to be many things at once – and still matter?

Disclaimer: I know I am simplifying things here. The purpose of this post is just to get a discussion started. Can (and should) a financial institution play multiple roles? Are they prepared to do that? Traditional wisdom might not apply anymore, or will it become even more important to ‘go deep’? And by the way, if you have not seen the movie, it’s… well, interesting!