There are only a couple of "ground truth streams" flowing into a businesses accounting. Making sure you own as many as possible of them goes a long way towards automating the tasks necessary to properly model the business and do the accounting.
I was referring to the entry barriers here because being able to offer for example a business bank account, credit card etc. with proper APIs to trigger payments and receive transactions in realtime still carriers regulatory hurdles in most countries that are not negligible, even if it got cheaper in most countries. Same goes for loans, factoring...
Lot's of areas to earn money with, pretty much everyone in that space has it in their slidedeck as a revenue channel somewhere down the road.
I could further elaborate but at the end of the day it's moving offtopic.
I'd say predicting the future is less hard than arriving there.
I believe that's largely because they spend a lot of time listening to their customers, understanding their needs and sifting through the trends in their businesses.
What's harder though, is inventing the future. Apple I believe did it in some ways with the original Mac, iPhone and iPad, and Tesla are now doing it with their cars.
Lots of C's were very, very wrong about the future.
I notice it in our industry (Accounting Software) a lot. All players, when talking to them on a C-Level basically know where the puck is going, but the capability to move the company there is for various reasons extremely different.
This doesn't just mean that small agile startups have the advantage, there are also lots of moats and synergy requirements that can restrict new entrants of reaching the level necessary to perform at the expected level in the future.