“Technology is most valuable to a holding institution not as a product but as infrastructure — capability that strengthens every part of the Group simultaneously.”
Technology is often positioned as a force of disruption — a mechanism for destroying existing value and creating new value in its place. For a holding institution with a long-duration ownership mandate, this framing is not merely unhelpful. It is actively misleading.
The more important question is not how technology disrupts existing industries but how technology can be built into the institutional architecture as a source of permanence rather than instability. This requires a fundamentally different approach to technology investment.
Technology as Infrastructure
The most valuable technology for a holding institution is not the most innovative. It is the most foundational — the capability that, once built, strengthens every other part of the institution simultaneously.
“The institution that builds technology as infrastructure rather than as product creates a compounding advantage that accelerates with scale and time.”
Intelligence infrastructure is the clearest example. The systems that improve how the institution senses its environment, processes information and makes decisions are not products — they are institutional capabilities. They do not depreciate with use. They appreciate with it, as the institution accumulates the data, the models and the institutional knowledge that make them progressively more effective.
The Permanence Criterion
When evaluating technology investments, the holding institution should apply what might be called the permanence criterion: does this technology create capability that will be more valuable in ten years than it is today? Technology that meets this criterion is worth building as institutional infrastructure. Technology that does not is better acquired as a service.
This distinction shapes the entire approach to technology investment — from the governance structures that oversee it, to the talent required to build it, to the time horizon over which its value is measured.