Strategic Partnerships: The Key to Ecosystem-Driven Growth
In 2025, companies win through smart partnerships, not size. From Revolut to CaixaBank, successful firms leverage ecosystems to accelerate innovation, co-create value, and compete at speed, proving that the right collaborations drive transformation across industries.
Here’s one statistic we like to use when we talk to innovation leaders in banking: Revolut, a company barely a decade old, founded in 2015, is now valued at over $40 billion. That’s more than Barclays, a 334-year-old institution (and the second largest bank by market capitalisation in the UK).
The difference? While Barclays spent decades building everything in-house, Revolut built an ecosystem.
This isn’t just a financial services story though. It’s the story of how value gets created in 2025.
And it’s why the companies winning today - in any industry from supply chains, to healthcare, retail and finance - aren’t the ones with the biggest balance sheets.
The winners are the ones with the smartest partnerships (and the best mechanism to assess, align and onboard them).
The Ecosystem Imperative
What do we mean by partners you might ask? Well, definitions are blurry as in many things digital-commerce related.
The digital age has transformed the relationship between buyer and seller and with it the language we use to describe it: content creators, influencers, ecosystems all sound harmless while somehow hiding the often ruthlessly commercial motive behind them.
Which is why it’s so important to get them right: the wrong partnerships don’t just waste time, they can destroy value - causing long-term reputational and commercial damage.
But get them right and they have the power to enable innovation and accelerate transformation among even the slowest moving industries. Some best practice examples:
Utilities, Enel (Italy): Developed a partner ecosystem spanning smart grid tech firms, renewable energy startups and urban mobility providers to help the company transition from being a grid company to a consumer energy platform.
Healthcare, Mayo Clinic (USA): Developed partnerships with AI tech firms, healthtech startups and big tech cloud provider to digital diagnostics and real-time care delivery platforms
Manufacturing, Siemens (Germany): Launched the Xcelerator ecosystem and industrial app store connecting 5,000 trusted partners into an open innovation platform to serve industrial clients across multiple industries.
It’s not that corporate leaders are not aware of the issue. Research by Oliver Wyman (a management consulting firm) in 2024 found that 85% of corporate leaders believe that “breaking down walls and fostering collaboration” was a top priority for CEOs. The same firm also asked leaders of large financial firms in Africa to rate the importance of partnerships on a scale of 1 to 10. The average answer was 9.3. A big thumbs up then.
It’s just that getting them right is difficult: A 2020 survey found that 40% of contracted bank-fintech partnerships never see the light of day (a third of banks reported even higher rates of partnerships that fail to ‘operationalise’).
But here’s the hard truth. Challenging they might be, optional they aren’t.
Between rapid technology cycles, AI talent wars, regulatory complexity, and customers who expect Amazon-level digital experiences everywhere, no organisation can compete alone - regardless of how deep their pockets are.
So the question isn’t whether to build partnerships. It’s whether (and how) you build the right ones.
Financial Services: Poster Child for Catch-Up
The financial services industry offers the clearest focus on this transformation.
Although their progress has been patchy, banks that once guarded customer data like crown jewels are now opening APIs, launching platform banking initiatives, and racing to partner with fintechs they once dismissed.
McKinsey put it bluntly: “Partnerships are no longer optional in financial services. They are critical to bringing products to life, adapting to customer expectations, and reducing time to market.”
And while digital super-scalers like Revolut (UK), Nubank (Brazil) or Tyme (Singapore) seem to be rapidly stealing market share in every region - there are highly successful examples of banks that are grasping the digital nettle.
Case Study: JPMorgan Chase (USA)
The world’s biggest bank by market cap, JPMorgan didn’t tiptoe into partnerships - it jumped at them.
The bank acquired or partnered with fintechs across critical functions: Nutmeg for digital wealth management, Renovite for cloud-based payments, Greenlight for financial literacy.
The benefits are as much about improving the firm’s digital presence as they are about driving a digital culture into the ‘mother ship’: JPMorgan now releases innovative products twice as fast as it could through internal development alone. It’s expanded wealth management to younger, digital-native investors.
And it’s done this while maintaining the operational rigour and brand trust that took 200 years to build.
As JPMorgan’s CTO noted at a 2024 fintech event: “Strategic partnerships have helped us think at fintech speed while maintaining operational rigour.”
Case Study: CaixaBank (Spain)
Savings bank CaixaBank of Spain took a different approach - with a focus on becoming an orchestrator of innovation through an ecosystem of partners. With its “Imagine” lab and fintech accelerator programs, the bank collaborates with universities, startups, and tech incubators, transforming open banking from a compliance obligation into a competitive weapon.
The outcomes:
25% increase in cross-platform customer engagement
Enhanced AI-driven credit scoring through ecosystem data
Rapid product testing through fintech sandboxes
Again, improving or adding to the culture of the parent bank has been a key principle to help CaixaBank decision-making process: Every partner must align with its ethical, customer-facing narrative - preventing the fragmentation that often kills large-scale innovation initiatives.
Beyond banking however other industries are leading the way.
While banks play catch-up, other industries have already rewritten the playbook - as we’ve seen above. Institutional giants in healthcare, energy and manufacturing have come to terms that innovation happens faster (often better) with partners than in isolation.
The Partnership Trap: Selection Matters More Than Speed
It’s not hard for large firms to find partners (globally there are over 15,000 healthcare startup firms, and at least 30,000 fintech firms). The uncomfortable truth is that most partnerships fail - not through technology, but through poor partner selection.
Harvard Business Review calls it “ecosystem fatigue” - when disconnected strategies, clashing cultures, or misaligned incentives derail transformation efforts and erode customer trust.
When Partnerships Go Wrong
A hasty AI partnership dilutes your brand when the vendor’s operations lack transparency
Cultural mismatches between legacy institutions and fast-moving startups create internal resistance
Superficial ESG alliances damage trust when stakeholders spot “greenwashing”
Successful Companies Do it Differently
They treat partnerships as strategic extensions of their business model, not bolt-on services. Strategy expert Roger Martin writes: “The point of a strategic partner is to bring a capability that helps turn your aspiration into reality.”
The best partnerships are not transactional but transformational. They’re about co-evolution (based on a clear vision of the future of the organisation, and the industry), not just opportunistic scale.
The Partner Selection Litmus Test
Before signing any partnership agreement, ask:
Mission alignment: Will this partnership enhance or confuse our mission?
Cultural fit: Is there mutual respect and understanding of our organisation’s culture?
True capability gap: Do they bring capabilities we genuinely lack - or are they just a shortcut?
Customer promise: Could this partner help us become better guardians of our customer relationships?
Steve Schmida, author of Partner With Purpose, frames it: “The most transformative partnerships come from taking time to align on both the why and how. Otherwise, you’re scaling distraction - not transformation.”
Your Ecosystem Readiness Checklist
Whether you’re in banking, energy, real estate, or logistics, here’s how to build a partnership-first mindset:
1. Map Your Ecosystem
Identify who brings speed, trust, market access, and complementary strengths across technology, channels, data, and innovation.
2. Start With Strategy, Not Tech
Align partnerships with long-term business strategy and customer needs. Build them into your operating model, don’t bolt them on.
3. Get Governance Right
Classify partners (transactional vs. strategic), define success KPIs, and create clear onboarding and exit frameworks.
4. Design for Modularity
Use APIs, interoperable data layers, and cloud-native infrastructure to enable faster integration and lower time-to-value.
5. Demand Mutual Value Creation
Establish mechanisms for shared learning, co-investment, and co-marketing. The best partnerships evolve you, not just scale you.
6. Assess Cultural Compatibility
Misaligned culture is the number one reason partnerships fail. Ensure trust, accountability, and decision-making styles mesh from day one.
The New Rules of Competition
Successful firms no longer compete entity-to-entity - they compete ecosystem-to-ecosystem.
The most resilient organisations over the next decade won’t be the ones with the most centralised control. They will be those that can adapt flexibly, can co-create with external players, and deliver seamless digital services to increasingly demanding customers.
The game has changed. The winners will be those who recognise that the route to resilience runs through collaboration.
The question isn’t whether to build partnerships. It’s whether you’re building the right team to win the game where the rules have changed.
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Simon Hardie is an author and founder of findexable - the digital analytics and insight platform. He co-hosts the Born to Disrupt podcast with Mingzulu and Disrupts
