"Rakuten Ichiba is Japan’s single largest online retail marketplace. It also provides loyalty points and e-money usable at hundreds of thousands of stores, virtual and real. It issues credit cards to tens of millions of members. It offers financial products and services that range from mortgages to securities brokerage. And the company runs one of Japan’s largest online travel portals—plus an instant-messaging app, Viber, which has some 800 million users worldwide. Retailer? Financial company? Rakuten Ichiba is all that and more!"

Competing in a world of sectors without borders McKinsey Quarterly July 2017

I examined this in "Siemens, Philips & GE -digital transformers?"

In another article I questioned who will own industry stacks prompted by 

  • auto manufacturers  investing in uber style companies (Jaguar Land Rover and Lyft)
  • Tesla bundling insurance with cars
  • Software vendors driving autonomous cars and trucks

See "Autonomous cars may change the source of insurance innovation

These boundary changes are the catalyst to digital disrupters challenging analoge incumbents. Who owns the industry stack owns the industry!

See "Digital transformation and industry stacks"