Our strategy and position in the mutual business

Most of our clients are industrialage companies and they carry with them a lot of industrialage baggage. Unfortunately, neither we nor most of them are fortunate enough to be born on the Web companies.

In this review we are going to discuss:

How does one need to thing about succeeding the rules;

How does one behave; and

What we need to do as a leading credit reference agency (bureau) in development of engineering capital investment projects and technology innovations in the system of IIC's fellow group, therefore, providing credit information and fee-only financial advising to add value to our customers?

We are not going to discuss here how to design a cool Web site. That's nice, that's important component of doing business but frankly there's easy way to actually build cool Web sites, you simply hire our Internet Communication Services of any ad agency, all of them can do that very well.

Traditional/popular views of e-commerce or e-business are focused around the notion of business transaction via the Net.

In other words, the focus has been how do I sell stuff or my products/services over the Web. This view focuses us to look at thinks too narrowly and loses the true nature of how revolutionary these changes are.

An extended view of e-Business: it is a way and a fundamentally radical way to reshape, recreate, reinvest business relationships though Internet related technologies. And an additional component might be really the critical of driving speed, flexibility, agility, new value creation.

You certainly have already asked yourselves Why? "Why I should have being doing e-business? I cope Google, I get along eBay and IIC, but I'm an industrial-age company, I sell to business enterprise customers, I sell. What then does IIC have to do with me? Our customers are good standing on their market place despite the Global crisis. Now what they need is a partner in this ecosystem like IIC to go to them and say, "Look, we can help you build an infrastructure as well as e-business initiatives that sit on top of the infrastructure." But you are going to do this by yourselves.

Another thing to think about with respect to the Internet economy is using the term MarketSPACE. Business has traditionally taken place in the Marketplace, the physical world where buyer and seller conduct business. We knew what that was. We had economic outputs, and we had market segments, those customers that we would sell things to. This new space, the Internet economy, or the MarketSPACE, is very much being led by the Internet and it's creating this kind of virtual arena where exchange of value can actually be had. It has and operates with very different rules. It place in virtual space. It doesn't have necessarily brocks and mortar, but what it does is it certainly competes to a certain degree in the automotive industry versus, let's say, a General Motors dealership which literally has a particular geography or radius that it can complete with.

When we say business models we understand the way companies can make money and extract value for customers.

Infomediary: a brand new generic model of making business. This is an entity that brokers information, knowledge and/or products that add value to a particular marketspace.

One of the popular themes is a theme of disintermediation. In a very brief way of phrasing it, it's the death of the middlemen. e-business and the Internet allow producers to go directly to consumers, or in contrary, in the financial field the borrower to contact directly to the lender.

In fact, if anything, it's actually quite the opposite, that there's not only not the death of the middlemen, but some of the best opportunity out there in the Internet economy are infomediaries. Now they revolve less around the physical movement of products and more around the virtual management of bits and bytes, information, content.

Four different kinds of infomediaries: the buyers/borrowers broker, the sellers/lenders broker, the transaction broker, and the community of interest.

Example: The infomediaries—the borrowers brokers—search the investment market in their network of banks or individuals, called ultimate investors, those who have money to invest and are going to perhaps be providing to you the desired loan for an engineering project, and go through the loan process and all the other adjunct things that you may need to actually do get a loan for a project.

Lender Broker do the same thing but in the opposite direction. They aggregate lending institution/investor information for the borrower. They will take a bunch of consumers and purchasers of, for example, small credit facilities, as well as issuers of small portfolio of securities, compress them to the big entity so that they can then go to the banks or investment or venture capital companies, and say: "Hey, look at what I've got, give me a better deal." In fact, they facilitate the conversion of available savings into investment and thus perform the important economic function of improving the flow of needed capital. But they're really, in essence, servicing up to the bank some very beautiful demographics. New and expanding enterprises; reorganized, merged, or consolidated firms; and government units look to the infomediaries of this kind for the financing of their capital requirements. So they are aggregating borrowers (buyers of loan facilities) for the bank or bank syndication, the seller of capital, but in the opposite direction.

The transaction broker does both of these things at the same time. It aggregates both the borrower side and the investor/lender site and brings them together to create value. Same kind of benefits, transaction costs reduction on both sides. Imaging if these activities needed to take place in the physical world. Quite an inefficient process the way we have it really going on.

And finally the concept of COIN, a community of interest. COINs do those three things. They aggregate borrowers and investors/lenders, but they do it around these three core concept of content, community and commerce in that order. But the COINs, communities of interest, can also be had along other areas—financial communities of interest, components of part of a value chain, a market segment, a kind of transaction. There are many different slices in which these infomediaries are emerging. They take a very important place in the modern financial e-world and e-business forming the society of investment bankers.

Trust Intermediaries. The next step of development of the intermediation in the modern e-world, and which I hope we exercise in our practice successfully, is the trust intermediary. That's an entity that creates trust between the investor and the borrower. And there are a couple of different kinds of trust, but it is that mechanism that allows me as consumer to feel comfortable that this is a trustworthy place to be or things to do. These roles are not mutually exclusive. In other words, organizations can and do play mutual roles.

The problem is, for incumbents, for company leaders, they tend to not look at these space and that's where the danger is. So going back to the previous statement of disintermediation, you've noticed, and our research pretty much bears the fact that the biggest activity, the most abundant activity really lies in this notion of the new kind of intermediary or new kind of middleman.