I wrote two years ago for The Australian<\/a>, the Aussie taxi industry has been tipped upside down by Uber and a cast of smaller competitors.<\/p>\nHow the taxi companies failed to adapt is interesting. In most cities they were protected by a nest of laws and regulations that were ostensibly to protect passengers and drivers but actually acted to create high barriers that benefited license owners.<\/p>\n
In most cities, certainly in New York and Sydney, taxis were dirty and unreliable \u2013 drivers were treated poorly and passengers were taken for granted \u2013 which made alternatives\u00a0attractive even before the cheaper UberX and Lyft services arrived.<\/p>\n
The protection also made the taxi companies slow to adopt new technologies. There was no reason why Australia’s Cabcharge or San Francisco’s Yellow Cab Company couldn’t have developed a smartphone app to order taxis, track progress and improve\u00a0business expense reporting\u00a0\u2013 that they didn’t speaks volumes about their inefficiency and complacency.<\/p>\n
Being complacent was understandable though as regulators were tame and kept competitors out. Customers had nowhere else to go.<\/p>\n
When customers did get the chance, they voted with their wallets and now its the bank accounts of taxi owners and their lenders who are hurting.<\/p>\n
That Capital One is feeling the effects of that change is telling \u2013 when genuine disruption happens there’s a range of businesses, people and stakeholders affected. We should never underestimate that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The cost of an industry’s disruption is felt by many stakeholders, as one US bank is finding.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4969,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1023],"tags":[128,496,606,723],"class_list":["post-15466","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-disruption-2","tag-banking","tag-disruption","tag-taxis","tag-uber"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t