Beyond Resilience

Is success pattern based? Is the journey of successfully building new banks or financial services businesses (either from scratch or in the context of reforming a going concern) predictable enough to be repeatable? And if there are patterns, are they within our gift to replicate? Beyond Resilience: Patterns of Success in Fintech and Digital Transformation asks these questions and seeks answers among the people who have first-hand experience of building new things and who live to tell the tale. This book is not a hagiographic founder story that elevates the founders own narrative to a montage of challenge and resilience, grit, perseverance and a soaring successful crowning at the end: a narrative that, figuratively speaking, can play out while Eye of the Tiger is blaring in the background. Nor is the book a series of vendor testimonials that cover in a few thousand words each their own triumphant digital projects. These stories are not untrue but can be too generic to be illuminating, too vague to be helpful, and too hollow to be the whole truth. Filled with interviews from leading fintech entrepreneurs, this book strives to tell the whole truth about building new things. It shares the stories of leaders who admit that as they built their businesses, they learned a lot, changed a lot, and made mistakes and had to course-correct. The book attests that leading new fintech ventures or digital transformations, whether they are started with a blank sheet of paper or within an established entity, is hard and unpredictable. It requires control. It requires consistency and integrity. It requires standing strong, ideally not alone but with a team of equally strong leaders. It requires going beyond resilience.