W14 - Macroeconomic Imagination

Last week I attended a product discussion on reducing costs in B2B payments. Inspired by some of Zhiyuan’s points, I had a few reflections.

When we look for solutions we still tend to confine ourselves within the B2B frame. For cost reduction, we forcibly try to use the tools at hand, and the solutions we find often have low leverage — for example, data acquisition or marketing. Taking a moment to think: is that really what we should be doing at this stage, or are we using these approaches simply because they are available or look impressive? Two specific insights emerged. First, leverage external momentum: when building our own payment capability from 0 to 1, must we painstakingly do every step ourselves? What can we borrow — for instance, Meituan Pay’s brand recognition and user education can be leveraged via the consumer side. Second, accumulate momentum: the biggest funding difference between B and C is around settlement funds — a vast resource we haven’t sufficiently exploited. To raise the share of balance payments, we must increase the settlement amounts that flow into wallets. That requires looking upstream beyond payments: when more money sits in accounts, a higher proportion of payments from balance will naturally follow. Figuring out how to leave more funds in the system seems like a wallet problem, but since there is a B2B demand, B2B teams can drive it. Increasing wallet balance retention benefits the whole B-side business, helps conversions for other services like Shengyibao, and improves the overall funds-closure rate. You can even converge some merchant prepayment or consumption scenarios inside the wallet so balances flow directly into spending — that has significant potential.

The root issue is our limited level of thinking, inadequate macro imagination, and insufficient ability to design a blueprint. A core idea from the book Toward Independent Innovation is that you must be “independent” before you can “innovate.” The book cites forty years of China’s auto industry around 2000, asking why in the first 20 years with guidance and support we still failed, yet in the following 20 years without oversight independent brands emerged. The point is that regardless of how poor the foundations are, you must clearly know what you lack and what you have. Being able to fully sketch the end-state is the decisive factor. One major difference between OKRs and KPIs is that with KPIs you don’t need the final picture — you just meet quotas on schedule — whereas OKRs require you to care about the picture your boss and partners are trying to achieve and to work to help them get there.