Paper: how Toss built an asymmetric competitive advantage
A SER-M case study of how a resource-poor fintech reshaped Korea's financial market.
Lab Director Byung Jun Kang published a case study in the Journal of Mechanism Management on how the fintech company Toss reshaped Korea's financial market despite having far less capital and infrastructure than incumbent banks.
The study applies the SER-M (Subject–Environment–Resource–Mechanism) model of Professors Dong-Sung Cho and Hwy-Chang Moon, together with a weight–sequence model (WSM). Toss put customer inconvenience first, used the opening created by complex authentication rules and younger customers' shift to mobile, invested in a data-driven organization, intuitive UX/UI and AI, and built a concrete execution mechanism such as money transfers completed in about three seconds.
The paper argues that for latecomers with limited resources, where to put the weight and in what order to act decides success. It presents the model as applicable to challengers in other industries such as healthcare, edtech and manufacturing.
Original article: Money Today