The next iteration of digital services capitalises on new capabilities.
Companies already investing in
this opportunity
opportunities in digital services to 2030
Digital transformation, or the digitalisation of existing services, has already upended old ways of working. But new technologies offer the chance to go further and faster. The next stage of digital services takes a digital-first approach to reimagine all aspects of a business, from business models to customer experiences, taking advantage of new capabilities to create value.
Two notable areas of digital services include finance digitalisation and management digitalisation. Finance digitalisation includes digital marketplaces for sustainability trading, trading pattern identification and automated investment decisions, managing financial risk for client credit worthiness and fraud detection, for example.
Management digitalisation could include cloud software for construction project management, a system which allows for advanced energy asset management or data analytics. Digital twin modelling and forecasting services, where digital copies of a business are generated and used for predicting future events, from maintenance to operational efficiency, is increasingly playing a role in transportation, industrial automation, construction and manufacturing sectors.
Services around automation and prediction are offering huge opportunities. Notably, blockchain, AI, and analytics are key technologies driving innovation in digital services. Examples include blockchain-based payroll system ETCH which generates smart contracts for construction payroll management to automate payrolls.
Annual growth rate of the global digital transformation sector to 2026
ERP software market size by 2030
Global digital transformation market size by 2026
Opportunities related to digital services include improving workplace productivity, reducing costs, increasing efficiency, improving customer experience, and reducing fraud. Unsupervised reinforcement learning of internal and external data such as social media can help detect money laundering and fraud during the underwriting processes, for example. While advanced character recognition and natural language processing (NLP) allow digitalisation of legacy hard-copy documents into structured datasets and the extraction of key metadata.
Technology, media and telecom companies have been pioneering digital services relating to finance digitisation and management digitisation. Legal services, finance, professional services, retail, healthcare and energy and power have also been investing.
In management digitisation key players include professional services firms such as IBM, which partnered with SAP to migrate to next-generation ERP software. The new software integrates IBM businesses supporting software, hardware, consulting and finance with SAP’s footprint which extends to 120 countries and across 1,000 legal entities.
