Marketplace model services

Your business challenge

Facing disruption across value chains, including disintermediation and shifting profit pools, businesses must rethink their approaches to creating new models, value propositions, and products and services; securing alternative revenue streams; and distributing their offerings in innovative ways. This comes with opportunities for companies to disrupt business as usual through marketplace models, which have seen success in industries like retail, hospitality, mobility and FinTech. From consumer products to ride-hailing services and vacation rental websites, marketplaces — and the e-commerce platforms that created them — are helping businesses facilitate disruption and create new pockets of value for their organizations more quickly.

Cross-industry issues, such as suboptimal buying experiences and underutilized capacity, are making value chains susceptible to disruption. Marketplaces are addressing issues like these, helping connect providers with users of their products and services in a way that benefits everyone involved. To succeed at this, companies need to tackle challenges such as targeting and scaling the right marketplace business models — undertakings that are prompting CEOs, chief marketing officers (CMOs) and business executives to ask the following questions:

• Is the marketplace model the right capital investment for our organization, and does it create higher total shareholder return than other organizational initiatives?
• What value levers do we need to target, and what success metrics do we need to create the value case, and to measure and monitor value creation across the journey?
• What monetization strategy do we adopt, and is the customer the provider, the user, both or neither?
• Do we focus first on provider platform adoption or user adoption?
• Are the incentives of our leaders aligned to the success of marketplaces and the future value of my organization?
• Does our enterprise architecture support the integration, intelligence and agility that new marketplace models require?

Solution benefits

Adopting a marketplace model that enables both users and providers to benefit from their interactions, transactions and collaboration can create significant business value relatively quickly — including new revenue sources, enhanced experiences and ways of mitigating investment-related risks.

Solution features and functionality

Ernst & Young LLP (EY US) teams pull from all parts of the firm to help businesses answer the above questions and more, identify opportunities to target, define value creation and capture, implement the required technologies and changes to operating models, and design enhanced experiences for all marketplace participants.

Our approach focuses on four directives: private equity lens to value, humans at the center, technology at speed and innovation at scale. Our industry experience, next-generation digital tools and powerful partner ecosystem can help you identify new value at speed and at scale.

EY US teams can help clients realize the benefits of marketplace models, providing support with:

• Finding new sources of value and new value streams
• Increasing customer lifetime value, “stickiness” and customer satisfaction
• Increasing revenue at lower cost (by moving “production” to the outside)
• Accessing significant volumes of data to enable learning and strategy optimization, and personalization
• Creating a culture of innovation to bring incremental but continuous benefits to all sides of the marketplace

Why EY

With a data-driven, iterative market approach, EY US teams can help you achieve profitability more quickly, identify the investments that are most likely to bring value to your business and enable growth optimization strategies.