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Education

Coopetition: Instead of going it alone, fintech startups are showing up
with their ideas, and banks are giving them the platform,
Competition with and the capital, to leapfrog over their competition.

Coopetition can expand your reach
positive ROI Let's take this one step further. Collaboration can happen

between industries too. With the rising popularity of food
delivery apps like DoorDash and Uber Eats, for example,
restaurants that may have already offered delivery services
found they could expand their customer base when they
signed up for delivery platforms.
These platforms would advertise restaurants to their
extensive networks and send more customers to their
partners. The restaurants could then focus on their core
competency, which was food all along, not delivery.

Choosing an innovative or established partner can enhance
your business in the same way. So build coopetition into
our business model, and you'll have referral partnerships
that enable you to tap into broad networks across a
variety of industries. At Strike Tax, for instance, we work
with other accounting firms, bookkeepers, loan officers,
and anyone with a network that could benefit from our
services.
Tapping into complementary networks to find clients
By Tyler Kem creates win-win-win situations for everyone involved.
Strike Tax Advisory Your referral partners will be able to earn a fee, their clients
will have a chance to save money and your partners will
he gaming term "cooperative competition," be able to offer additional services without working more.
typically shortened to "coopetition" or "co-
opetition," describes when competitors work You can make coopetition work for you
T together and strategically utilize their strengths Structuring partnerships where everyone wins makes
to accomplish a common goal. In the business world, it coopetition a straightforward process. If you're ready to
may feel counterintuitive to reach out to potential com- make coopetition work, lay down a few ground rules.
petitors and collaborate on projects together. But coopeti-
tion, done right, brings in high-value returns. First, start by assuming positive intent. If you're someone

Your competition is already using coopetition who has a winner-takes-all attitude, you may struggle
to adapt to the flexibility that coopetition requires. Dale
We spoke recently with a payment processing professional Laszig pointed out in "The adjacent POS-sible," published
who uses coopetition to white-label his services. Rather Feb. 27, 2017 in issue 17:02:02."[Payment processing] is
than seeing competitors as adversaries, he recognizes a collaborative business, a long tail of large and small
his strengths can help him tap into networks he couldn't
reach on his own. The mental flexibility that coopetition
requires helped him pivot his business numerous times
over the last two decades so he could stay on the cutting
edge of fintech services. Want to dig into coopetition?

Melody Brue, the author of the Forbes article "Collaboration
Is the New Competition In FinTech," https://bit.ly/3NIDNDR, Adam Brandenburger and Barry Nalebuff, who are quoted in this article,
pointed out that since the pandemic began, popular wrote a seminal book on cooperative competition titled Co-opetition. First
startup payment methods have chosen to stack their published in 1997, the updated book is now in its ninth printing, available
services on existing banking infrastructure. She wrote, in a variety of formats, and described by its publisher, Currency Doubleday, as
"This collaborative approach lends the established banks
relevance and innovation while giving FinTech startups having "revolutionized the game of business."
decades of trust, customer loyalty, and ultimately, security
for its users."

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