Factors That Enable Reintermediation

Traditional intermediaries refer to service providers such as travel agents, real estate brokers, job agencies and insurance agents which matching services for buyers and suppliers in a traditional market. The introduction of Electronic commerce resulted in the automation of many tasks provided by intermediaries and seemed to eliminate the role of many traditional intermediaries, which is called disintermediation. However, depending on their market power, traditional intermediaries either will be disintermediated or fill new roles by providing added value and assistance, which is called reintermediation. According to the research of Alina M. Chircu et al. there are three conditions for reintermediation for traditional intermediaries. Three conditions are weak appropriability of EC innovations, ownership of co-specialized assets for both market intermediation and EC innovations and economies of scale. Besides these three reintermediation conditions, we hypothesize that leveraging BPO can be a suitable strategy for traditional intermediaries to be transformed into reintermediaries. Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) is the leveraging of technology or specialist process vendors to provide and manage an organization's critical and/or non-critical enterprise processes and applications. This paper will investigate the relationship between above reintermediation conditions including BPO and reintermediation.