Digital By Default

Most aspects of our everyday lives involve digital interfaces and corresponding customer experiences. Sandwiched between us and the rest of the world, they are our window to the world. This vantage point is often advantageous to those companies providing these interfaces to us, for they have access to the data and trust we place in their custody. Interfaces have always been valuable, even before the advent of digitisation. Owners of the interfaces between people are in a unique position to bridge the world in such a way that value flows reciprocally – and the smartest of interfaces know how to harvest this value. Harvesting value from any interface is of course a function of its ability to generate value to begin with. Interfaces are also always an intermediary; digital intermediaries have become very effective in connecting us with what we want and need. Their ability, like any interface, rests on their capacity to build trust and values so as to offer us a desirable mode for us to interact and transact with others. Traditionally, interfaces were, indeed, represented by actual faces, whilst nowadays we see a great deal of interfaces existing primarily or even purely in the digital world. Those trusted digital intermediaries have become very effective at connecting us for the exchange of value, sometimes even for high-value transactions – and doing so at a marginal cost to serve compared to that of actual people (i.e., human interfaces) who have made this their business. Other digital intermediaries prefer to augment human intermediaries, as is often the case in industries such as real estate or insurance…