'Whatever you do, do it well' was apparently the maxim that drove Walt Disney and his film empire and it certainly served him pretty well.

And it’s a concept I’ve been thinking about a lot recently as aspects of our industry and the technologies which drive it become increasingly specialised, to the extent I believe, it is. impossible any more for one agency or platform to claim to do everything well.

Perhaps as recently as 5 years ago, the standard practice was to buy hardware to host online services. Today, there won’t be many companies that don’t outsource hardware. And we’ve moved on even further, pushing this process to its logical conclusion as our industry starts to outsource software services too. Sitting in various online meetings with clients this week, it struck me how many companies, of all different sizes, outsourced multiple key services - Stripe for payments and subscriptions, Sendbird for messaging, Postmark for email delivery and even login-in authorisation with services such as Auth0 and Origo Unipass Identity. And then of course there’s Open Banking itself which, whilst many businesses would like to be able to offer OB to their customers, few are able to dedicate a team to manage the compliance, bank regulations and security issues for this single feature of their overall service.

Plugging in the very best feature to a system to do a single highly specialised job was on my mind when I realised that was exactly what I was doing when I sat down to write this blog.

As you might just be able to guess from my name at the top of this article, my first language is Spanish. I’m perfectly comfortable in English but I do agree with Walt Disney on the 'whatever you do, do it well' approach and if there’s any way I can tighten up my English communication I take it on board. There is of course spellcheck on Microsoft Word, a perfectly decent little piece of software, integrated into the application that will ensure I don’t make any glaring errors in my emails. However, if I want to ensure I am communicating not just accurately but in the correct tone, with precision and in the appropriate style, I use the AI-powered writing assistant software, Grammarly. Grammarly has been developed to do one thing superbly and is possibly 1,000 times more powerful than spell check.

I believe this is the way the world is going now, whether it’s for managing our leisure and working lives or for developing the most effective, intuitive, specialised platforms to power our organisations’ very life blood.

In the same way that Grammarly’s highly specialised, fit for purpose software has become my go-to solution for honing my communications, our clients are recognising that they can buy in our highly specialised wealth management products and integrate them seamlessly into their existing systems.

The days of 'all singing, all dancing' technology is gone. We need to find the best performers for every aspect of the show. We need Fred Astaire for the tap routines, Maria Callas for the high notes and Leonard Cohen if we want something seriously deep and dark.

by Diego Diquattro CTO, Visible Capital

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