Business Ecosystem Design for a High-growth Fintech

 

CASE SNAPSHOT

This was a fast-paced, 90-day engagement during Bakkt’s expansion into the crypto, payments, and loyalty ecosystem. As a fintech startup moving toward institutional scale, Bakkt needed to rapidly assess partnership opportunities, navigate regulatory constraints, and design experiences that could support multi-party integration.

MY ROLE

I led core service design activities, applying ecosystem strategy to identify, evaluate, and model cross-partner opportunities. My work bridged strategy, design, and compliance ensuring we could visualize integrated user journeys while staying aligned with enterprise infrastructure and emerging regulations.

CHALLENGE

Bakkt, a high growth fintech platform, was entering a critical expansion phase. Its early offerings in crypto, loyalty, and payments were siloed, limiting the company's ability to scale or differentiate.

The challenge was to create a clear strategic foundation for a unified business ecosystem. One that would enable integration across partners, offerings, and user experiences. This required more than UX improvements. It demanded a reframing of Bakkt’s value model, platform posture, and partner strategy.

STRATEGIC FRAMING: FROM PLATFORM TO ECOSYSTEM

To help Bakkt move from product centered growth to ecosystem scale opportunity, I applied ecosystem strategy frameworks to reposition the company’s role in the market.

Key mindset shifts informed the approach:

  • From product centered to complementary services
    Designing for mutual value across external partnerships.

  • From static planning to dynamic coevolution
    Enabling growth through adaptive, long term strategic relationships.

  • From decoupled offerings to integrated value flows
    Linking payments, crypto, and loyalty experiences into a shared platform logic.

  • From control to orchestration
    Positioning Bakkt to initiate value rather than dominate it.

These shifts provided the foundation for a more resilient, partner enabled growth strategy.

PROCESS

To translate strategy into experience, I collaborated with cross functional teams spanning product, partner strategy, legal, and compliance. My role focused on surfacing opportunity, modeling value creation, and delivering design assets to drive alignment.

Key activities included:

  • Mapping strategic partnership types and value exchanges

  • Facilitating co creation sessions with product and partner leads

  • Creating modular service maps to visualize potential integration points

  • Prototyping ecosystem flows to guide platform capabilities and experience logic

METHODS

  • Ecosystem strategy mapping

  • Stakeholder facilitation

  • Partner assessment frameworks

  • Design strategy documentation

OUTCOME

This work helped Bakkt to shift to an ecosystem led growth strategy. The assets and insights I developed contributed to:

  • A unified partner integration narrative

  • Clear partner segmentation and engagement models

  • Experience frameworks that spanned crypto, loyalty, and payments

  • Cross team alignment around a shared ecosystem vision

These deliverables supported both strategic clarity and executional momentum. They helped Bakkt lay the groundwork for scalable co creation with its ecosystem partners.

This was not a conventional service design project. It was an ecosystem strategy engagement rooted in coevolution, orchestration, and modularity. By reframing how value is created and exchanged across participants, the work helped define Bakkt’s role not just as a platform, but as a strategic connector.

 

Tool Example: Ecosystem Fit Evaluation Tool

Mapping Motivations, Roles, and Impact for Strategic Partner Alignment

A core tool in the Bakkt ecosystem strategy project was the Ecosystem Fit Evaluation Canvas, designed to assess the compatibility and strategic value of potential partner organizations. This framework was used to evaluate companies not just based on product alignment, but on their ecosystem role, business motivations, and multi-dimensional impact potential.

At the heart of this tool is a shift away from traditional “capability fit” models. Instead of asking "What can this partner do?", this approach asks:

  • "What role would they play in a co-evolving ecosystem?"

  • "What motivates them to participate?"

  • "What shared value would be created across dimensions?"

The Canvas Includes Three Integrated Zones:

  • 1. Ecosystem Role & Business Motivation (left):
    Here, we defined the potential partner’s likely position within the ecosystem (e.g., integrator, amplifier, bridge, anchor) and explored their strategic motivation , whether it's reach, data, utility, conversion, or category expansion. This uncovered alignment not just in offerings, but in purpose.

  • 2. Ecosystem Compatibility (center):
    A vertical assessment line was used to determine the degree of fit with Bakkt’s ecosystem vision and architecture. This helped visualize how naturally the partner could integrate into the broader value web through mutual value flows.

  • 3. Ecosystem Impact (right):
    Finally, we rated and categorized impact across multiple dimensions (e.g., customer value, platform utility, partner enablement, revenue lift). This multi-column structure helped identify where the greatest value would be realized, not just for Bakkt, but for the entire ecosystem.

Why It Mattered

This tool grounded our partner assessment process in ecosystem logic, not transactional logic. Rather than simply checking for commercial feasibility or functional overlap, we asked:

  • Will this partner make the whole system stronger?

  • Does their presence multiply value across other nodes?

  • Are they ecosystem-native or ecosystem-resistant?

By using this canvas, we were able to filter potential partners not only by compatibility, but by their capacity to contribute to co-evolution, a foundational concept in modern business ecosystem design. This directly supported our strategic goal: building a scalable, modular, and interdependent ecosystem around Bakkt’s core platform.