What Does the Metaverse Mean for the Banking and Financial Services Industry?
Discover how the metaverse is revolutionizing banking, transforming customer experiences, and creating new financial opportunities.
Advisory
Web3 & the Metaverse
Avatars. Token Communities. Crypto economies. Define your ambition in the new, connected ecosystem of value with ISG.
Define your Market Opportunity
Web 3.0 and the Metaverse will create new market opportunities. Define your company’s position now using insights from what the market leaders do.
Charting new revenue paths and seizing new opportunities has never been more urgent. Web3 and the Metaverse will unlock new possibilities. Web3 is an ecosystem play. Pioneering ideas today will create the leaders of tomorrow. Whether you are defending your market or seeking to be a disrupter, defining a strategy cannot be done in isolation without knowing the marketplace of established and new native players and platforms.
ISG is privy to the rise of new crypto-native startups and the solutions and offerings of established technology players. Getting to the how of your business plans can be challenging and ISG can help.
Build Web3 and Metaverse Pilots & Partner Ecosystems
Benefiting from and leading the Web3 and metaverse space means starting now.
But how do you achieve clarity on key questions, such as where to pilot Web3, whether metaverse pilots should be internal or external, and which strategic partners can be trusted to help? Our leading-edge partner ecosystem research, deep sourcing experience and actionable strategies allows us to occupy a unique (and independent!) position between blue-sky business strategists and boots-on-the-ground technology providers. We'll work with you to answer:
- How do we start a pilot in the metaverse/Web3? In what areas?
- Which partners can help us run a pilot?
- What does the Web3 and/or metaverse partner ecosystem look like? What are the new categories being formed?
- Who are the new crypto-native service providers? What services do they offer?
- What are the services being offered in Web3 and the metaverse? What is the maturity of these offerings?
- Are there some leaders who stand out? Who are they?
Can ISG Metaverse Advisory aid your Web3 journey?
To get you started, ISG helps you explore the business relevance of the metaverse, crypto economies and blockchain. Then we'll work with you to integrate these emerging technologies into your broader transformation initiatives. From assessing the efficacy of your current programs or developing pilot programs to governing your ecosystem to track success, we know how to derive business value from Web3.
Our metaverse advisory focuses on learning and “reimagining” sessions to help you envision and plan for business opportunities related to the metaverse. The sessions leverage in-depth ISG research to examine next-generation strategies, tools and technologies that will enable you to connect physical worlds with virtual worlds for employees, customers, clients and communities. Whether you need to find the right implementation partners, conduct a strategic re-design of your target operating model or define a metaverse sourcing strategy, ISG can help you separate hype from actionable strategies.
The market has moved from ambition to accountability.
AI investment is accelerating, but results remain uneven. Only one in four initiatives is meeting revenue impact expectations, at an average spend of $1.3M per use case. Enterprises are no longer asking whether AI works. They are being asked to prove that it pays.
What We Deliver
AI strategy, governance and intelligence, built for execution.
Autonomous Enterprise
Operations built for autonomous execution, not retrofitted for it.
We help you identify where AI agents deliver the most value, restructure workflows around them and build the accountability models that keep autonomous execution auditable. The enterprises that win won't be the ones that reacted. They'll be the ones that designed for it first.
Autonomy-Level Pricing
Pricing that reflects how AI-enabled services are actually delivered.
We give enterprises transparent, benchmarkable pricing models that tag each resource unit with the autonomy level used to deliver it. As AI capability advances, your pricing keeps pace. Both buyers and providers can quantify what that progress is worth.
AI & Software Intelligence
Build-versus-buy decisions grounded in what AI is actually delivering.
We bring analysis of more than $2.6 billion in tracked AI spend to every sourcing decision. Procurement, technology and finance leaders get the independent intelligence to rationalize vendor portfolios and hold providers accountable to measurable outcomes.
AI Governance
Governance that accelerates AI adoption rather than constraining it.
We embed controls at the point of data creation, define accountability for autonomous actions and build adaptive frameworks that keep pace with AI without impeding it. Enterprises that get this right don't just manage risk. They build the trust that lets them scale faster.
AI Strategy
AI investment aligned to where impact is most achievable.
We ground strategy in research across 2,400 enterprise use cases, aligning investment to where impact is proven and designing the data, talent and governance foundations that move AI from pilots into the workflows that drive commercial results.
AI Maturity Index
A clear view of where you stand and a roadmap to where AI starts delivering.
We benchmark your AI readiness against peers across 75 countries, identify the dimensions holding you back and give you a personalized roadmap to close the gap.
The market today
Enterprise AI has moved out of IT and into the revenue line.
AI investment is shifting decisively toward revenue-generating functions. CRM automation, sales enablement and forecasting have replaced chatbots and IT productivity tools as the leading use case priorities, reflecting enterprise recognition that productivity gains alone do not satisfy board-level scrutiny. At the same time, use cases in production have doubled since 2024, and the portfolio is diversifying rapidly, with over 300 distinct function and industry-specific use cases now in active deployment.
ISG research across 2,400 enterprise use cases shows that the strongest AI returns are currently concentrated in compliance, risk management and quality control, not in the growth and cost outcomes most enterprises originally set out to achieve
The gap between where enterprises are investing and where AI is actually delivering is the defining commercial tension of 2025. Organizations that close it by targeting functions with structured, revenue-attributable data and clear ROI measures will establish performance benchmarks that compress the window for competitors still cycling through pilots. The standard is being set now.
Where enterprises are feeling the pressure
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Business outcomes are lagging AI ambitionEnterprises are scaling Al faster than they are realizing value from it. The number of use cases in production doubled between 2024 and 2025, yet only one in four initiatives is meeting revenue impact expectations, and broad cost savings remain elusive. At an average spend of $1.3M per use case, the ROI gap is sharpening board-level scrutiny and forcing a harder question: are we building Al for impact, or for activity?
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Data infrastructure exposing deferred investmentAl does fail in isolation. It fails on the foundations beneath it. Most enterprises are running modern Al on architectures built for reporting and compliance. Generative and agentic Al demand real-time contextually rich, governed data at the point of use. Without it, pilots stall and value dissipate before it reaches the business.
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The barrier to scale is organizational, not technicalOrganizational readiness as the bigger constraint on Al adoption, not talent or tooling. Workflows haven't been redesigned. Decision rights haven't shifted. Enterprises that treat Al as a pure technology deployment, without investing in the human side of adoption, consistently report underwhelming ROI.
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Agentic AI is outpacing governanceAs Al moves from generating outputs to executing tasks autonomously, the governance gap widens. Agentic Systems introduce a new class of risk that static compliance frameworks were never designed to catch. Governing what Al does, not just what it produces, is now a business-critical requirement.
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Frequently Asked Questions
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A new avatar of the internet has been creeping up on the world. This new internet is the highly decentralized Web3. Web3 is the internet owned by the builders and users, orchestrated with tokens. To fully appreciate the value of Web3 and Metaverse, it is critical to understand how we got here and the journey of web1, web2 and web3. Web1 is the era of READ when it was the time of users and builders; Web2 is the era of WRITE which was ushered in the creation of content en masse; Web3 is the era of OWN, which combines the decentralized, community-governed ethos of Web1 with the advanced, modern functionality of Web2. Contact us to learn more.
The Metaverse presents a new era where we connect, work, and shop are at the convergence of physical and digital worlds. Leading businesses are beginning to explore the metaverse and web3 to create brand new experiences and goods to accrue value back to themselves. However, true value can be created only once one understands how the entire Web3/Metaverse tech stack comes together – and when one appreciates new concepts, like decentralized, autonomous organizations (DAO), NFT, blockchain and DApps. Businesses should go beyond the hype of Web3 and Metaverse to study less known topics like crypto business models and token economies – and start defining relevance for their particular industry. And then approach the Metaverse with a near-term action by understanding these technology stacks and selecting a few lower-risk opportunities available. Contact us to learn more.
Our web3 and metaverse advisory pivots around demystifying this emerging internet through learning and reimagination sessions, enabling clients to envision their business opportunities in the metaverse and web3 by going beyond the technology into the emerging business models, and which partners to choose per topic. We also offer guidance for providers and technology platforms to develop the right portfolios and offerings for this emerging space – as we deeply understand the buy-side of the equation. With the deeper understanding on how to define business relevance of metaverse, crypto economies, and blockchain, ISG can help clients assess the relevance and efficacy of their transformation initiatives, develop a pilot program, define the right capabilities to build in house, find the right implementation partners, define a sourcing strategy, and govern their ecosystem to track success.
ISG's web3 and metaverse advisory will be empowered by ISG research, which leverages metaverse market trends, provider ecosystem intelligence, and research on the impact of metaverse across the enterprise’s business, people, technology, and risks. It also addresses the solutions for the new sets of challenges on cybersecurity, privacy rights and regulatory compliance presented by the Metaverse and its components. Contact us to speak with an advisor about our insights.
ISG's web3 and metaverse advisory will be empowered by ISG research, which leverages metaverse market trends, provider ecosystem intelligence, and research on the impact of metaverse across the enterprise’s business, people, technology, and risks. It also addresses the solutions for the new sets of challenges on cybersecurity, privacy rights and regulatory compliance presented by the Metaverse and its components. Contact us to speak with an advisor about our insights.
