Digital Technology to Exponentially Disrupt Business
Technology is expanding in power exponentially. Continued new innovations and ideas continue to disrupt many industries. Processor speed, video quality, bandwidth, and more are all increasing significantly, so much so that modern businesses now depend on it for almost all of their daily activities.
Technology is allowing numerous startups to quickly scale their business to an industry giant in only a couple of years, boosting productivity and strategy management to unparalleled levels. Airbnb is set to become the largest Hotel chain in the world, without owning a single hotel. Uber has grown, in two years, to now control 65% of San Francisco’s taxi business. In addition to the ability of creating business empires in a short amount of time, also comes the potential of artificial intelligence and robots to replace 47% of U.S employment within the next decade.
What’s Causing these Changes?
The answer to this question is digitization. Almost everything can converted to digital format and made available to any amount of people instantly. No more taking copies of a paper to everyone in the office, upload it and hit send. Digitization brings about a new era of efficiency in terms of both speed and cost effective nature
Bitcoin itself remains one of the strongest contenders if the trend of digitization continues to remain an important aspect of innovation and business practices. An important thing to note about how digitization reduces cost is the fact that the marginal cost of sending an additional digital asset is close to zero. This applies to data, files, emails, and other things on the corporate level. Think about it like this, there might be a fixed cost of using a service, but once that service has been used a certain number of times, then the cost to use that service to send an additional asset becomes roughly equal to zero. To businesses, reducing marginal cost is essential to creating more cost effective methods of operation.
Bitcoin has an edge as a payment option due to the fact that it does not have any fixed costs (unless a payment processing company is used) and that transactions can be bundled together for additional transaction savings (if they aren’t required instantly. Regardless, the Bitcoin network gives users the options to move funds very cheaply, and with incredible speeds when compared to traditional payment methods. As mentioned before, it is the digitization and cost-reducing aspect of technology that is increasing business efficiency and growth over short periods of times, this makes it likely that digital money will become increasingly popular, and businesses will likely want to shift to faster and cheaper methods than most currently use. Automated Clearing House technology is still used by a lot of banks, technology that was developed in the 1970’s. ACH bunches transactions in predetermined intervals and clears those bundles at the same time, taking up to 5 days. Digital payment options that reduce cost and increase speed have the ability to significantly disrupt the finance and banking industry along with new technology which will shift the way business is done altogether in the coming decade.
Source: Forbes
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