Bank X – The Road to Money Moments is through the Heart of your People

Posted on by Duena Blomstrom

Bankers ask us all the time why they can’t jump over this people betterment malarky and just go ahead and use our CX workshops to create Money Moments.

Many of our conversations go like this:

“We at Bank X love the idea of Money Moments instead of Banking Products!”

“Thanks, that’s great.”

“We think that’s spot on!”

“Brilliant.

“Can you guys come in and roll out some “EX not UX – how to Create Money Moments” workshops with some best practice examples please?

“Sure… Before we talk about that, what have you guys done to challenge the status quo of the offering so far?”

“Well we have various internal initiatives and projects.”

“Excellent – such as what?”

“There’s… well a multitude of things. There’s the overall digitisation priority of course.”

“…”

“And we are launching another innovation lab!”

“…”

“AND we are nearly ready for Open Banking!”

“Right. So are you guys fully Agile?”

“No – well that’s being implemented in some teams I hear.”

“Has everyone in Product and Proposition reentered around HLD? Have you popularised design with the rest of the organisation?”

“Well we’ve always designed well.”

“What have you found when you re-examined the full proposition with a “What if we had a blank slate, what would we build?” lens?”

“We do a lot of blueskying in every innovation sprint, I’m sure we have done some of that.”

“Have you asked your customers what counts for them money wise to design those moments?”

“We constantly listen to user feedback, sure.”

“What can you tell me about your culture? How empowered do you think your people are?”

“Huh? We attract the highest percentile of top graduates in the industry,  and we recently went through a strong re-branding exercise, we even changed the name of the digital offshoot so that’s not the issue – what’s the connection to changing products into MoneyMoments?”

“OK these banking products you want to change – how many of them do you have today?”

“…”

“Can we start by first taking an honest look at your organisation?”

“What? No! Why can’t we just get some of those killer-app style quick wins a consumer would like? Isn’t that a MoneyMoment?”

Leaving aside how MoneyMoments refers to the collection of all experiences the consumer has with their financial provider, whether overt or invisible, online or in person, conscious and subconscious, and not mere specific features or interactions, the answer to that is that even if the bank could create the most magical of UX while not having worked on Knowledge, Passion and Courage, then it would simply be masking the deeper issues within and it would be futile exercise with little end value.

And that’s a big “IF” because painting by numbers when it comes to the end-user experience simply doesn’t work.

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Moments of CX delight are unique and unless genuinely authentic and born of a true need to make the consumer happy they don’t resonate so they are non-transmittable.

This is why the extraordinary touch points that set Zappos, Disney and Apple aside have not become the norm cross industries.

It’s not for lack of information – everyone knows what makes the Apple store experience magical in terms of tools and processes – but while widely desirable it’s unrivalled. Everyone understands how Zappos goes above and beyond but offers mechanical copies of their wording at best. The technology Disney employs to make the experience seamless is easily accessible to any other experience provider be they a museum or a cinema and yet we don’t see it anywhere else.

What makes them unique is the intensely consumer-driven intention that built the experience. Their customer driven purpose. Their obsession with making them go “wow”.

Unless that spirit comes from the inside, unless the company  has enough good people with courage and passion who deliver against this purpose not because they read it in a white-paper, or it was mandated in their KPIs but because they live and breathe the conviction that it would make their customer’s life better – the “wow” can’t be copied and bolted on. Not consistently, not genuinely.

Supercharging emotions on top of the best of human centred design practices creates such magical experiences that we consumers fall -and stay- in love with the brands that can consistently give us that.

I ask bankers to imagine they could hook up the majority of their employees to a lie detector and ask them if they truly, genuinely, from the bottom of their heart care about their consumers.

Unless they are prepared to bet the summer cottage on how the answer would be a heart-felt, resounding “yes!” they shouldn’t wonder why their bank can’t delight and build MoneyMoments.

Agile – You’re doing it wrong

Posted on by Duena Blomstrom

Thankfully, in our team, we have to waste no sleep on wondering if any organisation that has a software-connected output needs to do it any other way than by becoming intensely Agile fast.

Even more thankfully, the banks we work with, are crystal clear on that too. They are of course a small minority if we look at all the banks in the world and the only ones poised to develop true competitive advantage by using FinTech and delivering addictive propositions while their competitors still try to work out the connection.

Where we differ, even with these courageous visionaries is the definition of “becoming Agile”.

To some, as I’ve deplored many a times before, it’s a restructuring organisational effort or worse, a PR exercise, whereas the companies who really reap benefits from it in the Valley and elsewhere in the world, live and breath it.

If we imagine a continuum starting at “lip service” and ending in “religion” successful software houses are invariably closer to the latter than the former. And make no mistake about it, anyone who writes and manages even as much as a line of code in their organisation with the intention of making money is a software house. Furthermore, should your organisation be the elusive unicorn that has outsourced its every breath and is not a software house, you should still be Agile.

Nobody argues that fundamentally changing is easy or pleasant so there’s natural resistance even in these shops of best intentions.

Leadership says: “We already approved this Agile thing, it’s being done by HR and IT, we don’t need to know what it is”.

HR mutters: “We already reorganised the teams – isn’t that it?”

The former Prince certificate holders project management and development teams say: “We have a kanban board in the office/we do stand-ups/we have a Scrum master/someone is Product Owner/we are called a ‘tribe” – we’re clearly doing this”

The strategists theorise: “Why are we insisting on all these rules and processes, wasn’t Agile was about being on your toes and winging it”

At every level of the organisation there’s resistance and most of it is perfectly natural.

We are, after all,  asking professionals with years of education and experience to disregard it and go with their hearts and their guts instead. We are asking them to shake every learned habit and form new ones where they have to constantly be on their toes, constantly be curious, constantly dare and constantly and intensely dare. It’s by no means an easy ask, on the contrary it’s hard and exhausting and for now ingrate and we salute the ones who take the challenge on fully and forge ahead.

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For these cool pioneers who truly want to get it done – here’s a list of what to beware of in Agile transformations, in order to get it so right that it starts paying dividends faster

If you find yourself spending on armies of Agile coaches and Agile Enterprise Coaches – you’re doing it wrong. You’re only creating a shadow organisation with little chance of it ever dissolving to see yours stand on its own.

If only “some parts of the organisation” are Agile with no plan to roll it out overall – you’re doing it wrong. As we said time and again, Agile is a frame of mind not a software project delivery method, and it’s not only beneficial, but painfully needed at every level of the organisation.

If anyone is the “Still-guy” i.e. “still has a dual role”; “is still expected to be involved in regular projects” or “still works in the old way too” – you’re doing it wrong. This is not a special interest hobby or like that time when you had some office volunteers organise the annual Christmas party.

If you find yourself ever saying “we can’t go ahead with X, the budget for Agile stuff is finished” – you’re doing it wrong. Does that mean the budget for operating is out? Should you close doors? It’s simply a sign that Agile is a thing some department does with some money thrown its direction and not the real change it has to be in the minds of your leadership team.

If anyone is uncomfortable around topics and wording such as “heart/passion”, “purpose”, “courage/bravery” and finds them to be to be fluffy and un-corporate; if you never discuss whether or not your people are trained and willing to take personal responsibility and redefine ownership; if you spent no time on the WOT (Way of Thinking) to get the WOW (Way of Working)  – you’re doing it stupendously wrong.

If you scrolled past this post and thought “not for me, I have nothing to do with Agile” – you’re likely not doing much of anything right.

Bank X – The one with the Bank CEOs

Posted on by Duena Blomstrom

The main reason why we don’t even tell banks about our deep CX creation practice from the get-go- the EXnotUX and the “Money Moments™ not Banking Products” workshops before they start on cultural transformation (or betterment) is that they would be unable to internalise them if they don’t have a ballsy CEO and let’s face it, most don’t.

I’ve talked about Banking Superheroes a lot and there are some inspiring examples in the industry. Typically they aren’t CEO level. In fact, I can only think of 4 bank CEOs who would fit the profile right now. This is both sad and possibly an indicator of organisational mass psychosis in terms of the presentation of a leader and the inability of HR to do better by them that is worthy of analysis at another time.

We also talk a lot about Courage at Emotional Banking and while we are rolling out programs for product owners and tribe leaders we rarely see SVPs of X or Y or even department heads strolling into the workshops. This is presumably because they are busy firefighting and creating very important things and can’t afford the time. Things that are a bigger priority than growing the bravery to turn the world on its axis.

It’s tempting to think there are several different kinds of courage and to arrive to where they have enough to mandate that the bank supercharges emotions on top of human design practice and becomes truly consumer obsessed, CEOs need a different kind of courage, a more CEOy kind.

It would be a lot easier for our firm to sell a “Courage for Strong, Important, Lovely, Supercalifragelisticexpialidocious Bank Leaders” to ensue they are in a room where the same bravery inducing exercises would happen as the ones we pack in workshops for the plebs, but it would also be a PR lie that panders to the very ills of the organisation we accuse.

While indeed CEOs should be Banking Superheroes they aren’t special and they don’t need a different type of courage just maybe, more of it as more is perceived to be at stake on a personal level if they fail.

CEOs with courage see past this year’s commitment to shareholders. They say “Yes this is not immediately tricking down to consumers and may be all but invisible in my time here but I am doing right by this place, I am laying down foundations so that all those that come after me can do the client facing wow-ing you are after. We have purulent wounds and we can’t slap bandaids on them, we have to surgically clean and sterilise them first.”

There are no bank CEOs in position today who do not have the know-how to correctly evaluate the status quo of the bigger picture or lack the ability to know they are simply applying bandaids in lieu of cleaning wounds.

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  • Revamping the mobile app in more hipstery fonts and colours? Band aid.
  • Restructuring around agile and organising teams in product tribes without changing the way they think? Band aid.
  • Adding a UXP layer to an aging spaghetti back-end? Band aid.
  • Starting a flanker brand? Band aid.

There are so many more examples.

Anytime worthwhile core concepts around experience, innovation and visceral changes such as Human Centred Design and Cultural Change are used as empty PR exercises in lieu of being fully embraced, that’s malpraxis.

In some ways it’s worst than bandaids, the lack of regard for real change means we apply solid, hard, cold plaster on top of those wounds, giving the patient even less chances for survival. They may limp out of the surgery but will they make it home before gangrene and sepsis set in?

This is not gratuitously morbid, the health of the organisation depends on the confiscation of bandaids and plaster.

videoblocks-surgeon-doctor-holding-a-scalpel-knife-with-blood-on-it_bz9yzxm_g_thumbnail-small01Hero bank CEOs armed with a golden scalpel need to scan every inch of their patient and locate every infected wound and cancer, put them under, then remove them or at the very least treat them quickly. And yes there are many and any long operation is extremely risky, there is no way to ensure they will wake up, but the truth is doing anything other would be criminal.

When a core banking system goes down and the bank is in the press for weeks that’s a glaring issue. It hurts the bank’s reputation and that of the CEO himself. It’s visible and painful but it’s also often times unavoidable and unpredictable so I personally never hold incidents as such where technology itself fails them, against any CEO, although there is a line of thinking suggesting that the right organisation has the right people to better safeguard against technology failing them.

What I find condemnable is when non-accidental failings that were waiting to happen materialise. Not urgently demanding profound change in the soul of the bank is one such temporarily invisible, insidious and catastrophic systemic failing and the CEOs that do not make this a priority are breaking the equivalent of the Hippocrates oath of doing no harm.

A bank asked me just yesterday why they can’t just jump this people betterment malarky and just go ahead and use our CX workshops to create Money Moments™. I told them it’s because even if they could create the most magical of UX while not having worked on Knowledge, Passion and Courage then it would still be nothing but a plaster on a slow festering gangrened wound and I’m hoping their CEO is on a health kick and ready to do grab a scalpel.

Who’s ready to hand it to them?

The Banker and the Sour Grapes

Posted on by Duena Blomstrom

*Warning – the following may cause your knickers to knot. If it does so, please re-read as it is meant as compassionate analysis not mindless bashing.*

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Today’s story will be about bankers’ cognitive dissonance when it comes to consumers’ needs.

We are all “grown” here so I’m sure everyone is familiar with what “cognitive dissonance” stands for but a refresher may be in order to help us along:

In short, it’s the feeling of really uncomfortable tension which comes from holding two conflicting thoughts in the mind at the same time.

The most well known example of cognitive dissonance can be found in Aesop’s “The Fox and Grapes” fable where a fox is really keen on having some grapes but can’t reach to eat them so decides to end its internal turmoil by concluding they weren’t going to be tasty as they were not ripe yet, originating the “sour grapes” expression.

Let’s replace the Fox with our Banker.

The fox’s thought is “I believe I fancy some grapes and I think I will reach and jump and generally do what is necessary to reach them and consume them which would make me happy“. Our banker’s equivalent is “I believe I am a good at my job, surrounded by good people and knowledgeable enough about FinTech that I accept fast changes need to occur in our digital proposition so I am working hard to ensure we make them fast enough to keep our customers happy.”

The dissonant thought on the part of the fox is “I know can’t reach the grapes” whereas the banker may think “I know that I am part of a nearly paralysed monolithic structure that is slow to come up with newness and implement it, that all the agile new challengers will bypass us on the race to the consumer no matter what I do.”

After having decided he can’t do it despite its better efforts, the fox thinks “‘They’re sharp and hardly worth my while!” while after seeing his first thought being uncomfortably challenged by the pace with which others are moving, the banker said no further than last week “Seen that there Tandem losing its license? Challenger -schallengers, no danger there, they won’t even make it to consumers, no need to hurry anyone, business as usual!”

Having personally heard variations of the “sour grapes” thought above from the mouth of a few different bankers, I was aghast. These are uber smart, uber hard working, very knowledgeable bankers, surely they can’t truly believe that.

Surely, I thought, they know that’s generally untrue and that examples such as Tandem’s story or Monzo’s tech issues or even the delays in Starling and Atom they use to make the same point, are not true illustrations of their license to relax as the customer will get better nowhere else, yet they say it. And momentarily believe it.

Furthermore, surely they know that the real threat and why they should not start leaving the office at 5 pm again and cancel their innovation labs, is not the challengers but the huge technology giants and what they are cooking in the background in digital money experience and yet they say that.

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Don’t get me wrong, I know for a fact bankers are aware that there’s threat in the immediate propositions too – after all no one contests that the challengers and the experience-layer-banks will serve to wet consumers’ appetite for impeccable UX and really contextual functionality and once wetted it may be impossible to keep critical dissatisfaction at bay, but when you add to that same CX magic the mass that the giants have – it should keep every incumbent banker awake at night.

Here’s the kicker though – they are human beings, they can’t keep being awake every night, they work double hard without the luxuries the other FinTechers have – the freedom of expression, the speed to see results, the feeling of being part of change at a suitably innovative, fast paced rhythm so they need the momentary relief.

I’ve said this many times before – no other industry behaves quite like ours or has been affected by the sharp advent of technology and its effects on customer experience in quite the same fashion so we’re experiencing unprecedented levels of discomfort in many ways irrespective what part of the industry we are in. All of us – bankers new and old, technology makers and commentators, we are all impacted by this spectacular time in the growth of digital and the money retail business. There’s no time to complacently relax into anything, deep conceptual thinking is nearly banned if we wanted to keep up, there is definite uncertainty to accompany ever growing demands and it feels like the more we learn, and the more we try, the harder it is.

FinTech these days has become like an immensely fast paced game with absurd levels of difficulty thrown in for ever-diminishing (or at least largely unclear) pots of gold. No one has to bare the stress more than those working in large incumbent banks. Spare a thought (and occasionally a pint of beer) for their painful bouts of cognitive dissonance, look them straight in the eyes and remind them “Forget Tandem, they’re not sour, keep trying to reach.”

I am a Banker – therefore I lie

Posted on by Duena Blomstrom

 

While I came up with the Emotional Banking concept a few years ago, it’s only been a year now that I’ve waved my banking-change crusader flag and inflicted my indignation of banks not caring about their customers’ feelings, full time. I’ve learned a lot in this past year.

I have learned in utter consternation that banks have no interest in being a serious brand like every other consumer business does. I’ve then learned why this is and dissected its utter perceived lack of imperative that comes from a lack of mobility that no other industry has the luxury to experience.

Next up I questioned how banks can be neigh but blind to the imminent changes in the industry – the peer-2-peer plays, the internet players, the experience layers (neo banks), the technology giants dabbling with financial services and the new challengers. How they justified being able to afford more of the lack of care to the way their clients really felt about their money.

“I lie to myself all the time. But I never believe me” – S.E. Hinton

It turns out their blinds are handed out as soon as they become decision makers in banking. If life were a science-fiction work by Philip K Dick there would be a higher evil mastermind that keeps bank’s boardrooms topped up with pre-Y generation males and then ensures they speak McKinsey talk in lieu of real English while loosely discussing hip FinTech words they once read in the Guardian for all of 2 minutes before returning to P&L and share prices.

This would help this evil mastermind ensure there’s no regard for the consumer, no insight into his or her needs and desires and surely no understanding of how to get, motivate and keep the right people who can put that new fangled technology to good use.

Sadly this is not a novel but our reality.

More worryingly, in the past few months I’ve witnessed the famed challenger banks, a wave of new and promising structures that Britain bet its farms on, start down that path as well. Business models that were courageous and disruptive iterated again and again to at most, tamer, pale versions of their initial selves, or worse, a completely different animal that amounts to more vivid colours on a version of the high streets current accounts. I’m sure if they cared to admit this is the case, they would blame it on the FCA license grilling but I believe it’s simply normal start-up pressure to demonstrate model which in their case means go to market half cooked an half stripped of dreams.

Maybe there is still time for the UK challenger banks to turn the boat around and do what’s right for the consumer but they need to stop crowd-funding till they break servers and charming conferences and journalists for vanity and put their heads down and give us insight and action.

Insight is all but absent in the industry. We never learn anything new. The same dusty statistical tidbits about amounts of tooth brushes versus mobile phones in the world and the length of marriage versus banking relationships are repeated over and over again. And it isn’t only the establishment that is guilty of it. Of the former (as undoubtedly they are even more today) 27 founders and CEOs of challenger banks the FCA has reviewed and that I’ve heard speaking in public or private contexts, do you know how many have had any revelation to share about consumers? If not “I’ve found the holy grail of savings” at least a “We saw huge anxiety when they tap in the overdraft so we change the colour of the app and the language to reassure”. You guessed it. Not one.

The incumbents blame the immutable inertia created by tens of years of patched, spaghetti-like backend systems, for their paralysis in real interest of what would truly make consumer’s lives better from the money point of view. If only they started all over, they say. The challengers don’t blame anything as they won’t admit it, but suffer from the same unwillingness because of natural constraints of being at the beginning and having to start proving their case. If only they had systems and mass, they think.

Meanwhile, the protagonist of the consumer centric mantra falls in between and gets what is, for all our FinTech sins, a flat design version of their online banking of 3-4 years ago topped off with an ever growing dread of customer support and mistrust in its uptime and an ever more futuristic in design cow-webbed branch.

It isn’t’ just the banks (big or small) either. We’re all guilty of it in the industry. We write articles, go to industry events and pat ourselves on the back for beginning to understand AI and Blockchain but we allow basic customer research to not happen anymore. We say it politely when we should allow ourselves to be alarmed and shake every banker we ever meet into action. We hear no revelations about consumer behavior about their money but we accept that what they really want is a new currency in identity and disruptive data and trust models. We have no serious interest in how to modify virtuous monetary behavior but we wave the “millennials want instant access to information” flag as if we came up with that nugget ourselves.

We lie. There’s no point in sugar coating it. When we collectively claim all we care about is the consumer and we will put them at the center of our every thought, but we banish design to a de-facto after-thought to prettify existent cumbersome products, we lie. When we say we’re building disruptive new models that will integrate money into larger digital contexts, but we don’t have the backend technology to even begin to understand the data, we lie. When we know as a consumer, as a human, that our needs are nowhere close to met in our interaction with our money holder, but we spend no time seriously studying those needs and feelings but say we do, we lie.

I fundamentally believe bankers old and new are not comfortable with this particular lie (research clearly shows they are ok with other kinds) and given the means would like to change it so let’s start with an honest look.

Where is experience design in your organisation? How many of the products and features you offer have been designed as compared to copied and modified?

How many people and how much time is devoted on good old fashioned customer research? Not the odd focus group to prove the choice of green on the left corner of the mobile app is correct but honest, intense research about their attitudes, emotions and views about money and the interaction with their provider.

How many innovation labs, funds, in- and ac-celerators have you poured (granted, non-significant) amounts of money into over the last 5 years? What can you point to that has trickled down to the consumer? How has it changed their financial lives?

Saying “it’s about the people” sets you aside from the old and dusty ones who won’t even admit that but is that rhetoric confined to water coolers and hip events or brought into the board room and made a priority? How many of you reward knowledge if you happen to accidentally have FinTech industry voices with strong opinions and a name working for you instead of treating them as having a shameful hobby? In your list of KPIs, OKRs or any other Rs does it say “Get, keep and nurture mega smart and passionate people who put the consumer first”?

Here’s the thing, we all agree the status quo won’t hold.

We all know you could become pipes (and that goes for challenger banks as well when it comes to invisible banking). We’re up against companies who get experience intimately, have brand, have people, have an obsession with understanding the consumer and don’t have to lie about it. We absolutely must shake the lip service, the convoluted meaningless language, the excuses about too much legacy or too little funding and the hope that these other guys “would never enter banking, why would they?” because at this rate, our lying amounts to such abuse of the consumer they may enter banking as sheer compassionate charity and not in the hopes of turning a profit.

P.S. My faithful readers – hi honey!- know, I end articles with a bang so the above phrase would have been the perfect point to leave hanging to emphasise the doom and gloom but that would make me guilty of the same demagoguery. This is not in the scare mongering series we all seem to write these days. This is a call to arms. I know so many of you reading this well and you’re amazingly passionate, smart human beings who struggle with the fact customer centricity is reduced to a lie despite how you still feel everything you do is with the consumer in mind. Changing it is daunting, but it’s doable. Let’s break this down and figure out how to listen and care and tell the truth about our culture and what it needs to fundamentally change and we will eventually get there. 

Coffee and the #FinTech Bubble

Posted on by Duena Blomstrom

Disclaimer: If you started reading this in the hopes that it will be chock full of figures to sustain my point, you may want to stop now. This is a ranty personal view and if you choose to read it, you’ll have to source your own reports to prove or disprove it depending on what side of this equation you find yourself in and what makes it easier to get through your FinTech day.

I get a lot of “My name is John Smith and I am as of now interested in FinTech and available on Monday at 15 pm around Monument, I will buy you a coffee to hear your opinions as your name keeps coming up” demands on Twitter. Needless to say this thrills me as I love coffee. Also because I’m independently wealthy and do not need to worry about selling my time and knowledge as a consultant. (This, for those of us who sometimes miss it in my articles, is sarcasm.)

There is an acute devaluation happening in FinTech. Of knowledge, of time and of actual sums of money. There is no point wondering why there are no “became rich through FinTech” stories as we may attribute that to it not having yet reached its potential, neither is there any point discussing the plight of trying to sell knowledge in a market intent on maintaining mediocre standards of know-how that accommodate the status quo. But it’s worth looking at the bigger numbers thrown around in the industry to see if those at least reward value. It seems the numbers simply don’t make sense here either. Part of it is normal dilution as the space is becoming overcrowded but part of it is baffling.

I don’t begrudge the superstar fund raisers their 10th round or their undeserved billion evaluation as it’s not all about whether eTorro is better than the host of other propositions in its space or SoFi is the exact same one as tens of other attempts in the US P2P market albeit with a more defined segment, it’s about who was in front of investors when they agreed to it. Same goes for why a new challenger bank would raise tens of million on a hope and a dream while a comparable proposition would have raised a quarter of that in their entire existence.

That may not be intuitively fair but it’s normal. Technology has never been about the pure product or solution but about what it is that transforms it from a scientific endeavor to a business proposition – the people behind it.

With that said, there has to be an intersection point where value of people’s salemanship can not cover lack of tangible technology, right? There is no way we, the industry, would finance absolutely non-existent preposterous propositions yet let valuable tech fall by the side of our golden bricks pathway, right? We may get confused by the lack of established vernacular and intentional consultancy speak making everything sound equally shinny and impressive and we may fall in love with some of their people but surely in our hearts of hearts we know enough collectively that the overall result will be one of the wheat separating itself from the chaff, right? Wrong.

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In the past 2-3 years it’s almost like we’ve become inundated with both people and proposals that are of very limited quality and yet we’ve also gotten less and less willing to be vocal about it. If knowledge is the emperor, the emperor is slowly shedding his clothes in our industry and we’re going to stand by and watch it become butt naked and not even point and snigger. We make wider and wider of bets. We’re less and less inclined to ever call a spade a spade and we found a way to believe this bubbling format of hundreds of incubators and accelerators, 30 challenger banks in one country only and growing YoY in people and solutions at a astounding rate is normal.

We are even so far removed from common sense that we can wonder IF this is a bubble. We compare ourselves with Tech in general, they are booming, in a healthy manner right? Why not FinTech, then? Because “Tech” is the underbelly of everything. Every aspect of our lives. FinTech is an overgrown mushroom of one thing only: the way money providers sort out their backend and their frontend to answer consumer needs.

Think about it – ours is a gazillion-billion industry which we believe will forever continue to thrive built solely around the fact that banks and others were unable to get their act straight on their own. Same goes for insurance hence the now emerging “InsureTech”. Where is RetailTech though? Or AutoTech?

One would argue it’s not only fixing but looking ahead and innovating and disrupting hence the space for the flock of savior-unicorns but why are we so accepting of the premise that innovation was only their apanage and non-accessible to the incumbents? Because they are big monolithic organizations paralyzed by a culture of fear to move which is why they need FinTech. Circular, isn’t it?

Most of us have accepted that a period of serious maturing and consolidation has to happen in FinTech fast and in a few years it will hopefully, mercifully even disappear as a term and be just “Tech” once again (with its wonderful Augmented Reality, Design DNA, Data and AI focus as the visionary of us – Brett King for instance have noticed). It will mean we finally got our collective house in order and are able to give people access and overview of their MoneyMoments in a simple, enjoyable way that flows into their lives.

I believe we are no further than 3, maybe 5 years away before this whole industry built on how culture prevented banks from fulfilling their purpose would have finally deflated and shrunk to a maybe a quarter of its size today so I would say taking a sudden interest in having FinTech coffees with me may be a poor career choice at this time, John.

EX – the antibiotic to cure Infectious Organisational Paralysis in CX professionals

Posted on by Duena Blomstrom

My “EX not UX” Emotional Experience method is generating quite a bit of interest these days and I am considering potential partners to help me bring it to more industries than banking and make it part of a bigger organisational culture
change suite as part of my “it’s all about the people and keeping it real” obsession. This means that I spent some more time reflecting on what I am aiming to achieve with it while preparing for the last two workshops of which an upcoming one with a large UK bank’s team of extraordinary designers.

The goal of the EX workshop is not to teach human centric design or empathy design but to attemptto make those who are involved in strategy, CX, digital or design prone to naturally, intrinsically create more empathic experiences. It aims to demonstrate the value of deeply and bravely recognising and analysing emotion and gearing their creative process towards enhancing the positive ones and minimising the negative ones.

How do I do this? I spend some time covering the theoretical basis of both the respective industry (in Financial Services it’s a solid2-3 hours of what’s new in FinTech, in Retail it’s a CX perspective, etc) and the basics of why creating delightful experiences is desirable, but then spend the remainder of the time honing attention, observation and empathy as skills through immersive experiences, open dialogue, exercises and roleplay. This is evidently a big ask for a room of 25 people over 2 days and I don’t aim to defrost all the Elsa’s and convert all the Grinch’s to enjoy Christmas, but people are surprisingly human and naturally empathic given half a chance.

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Once they understand there is a clear business benefit in being open, caring and feeling and this is not somehow done at the expense of the company but in its best interest, they embrace it with revigorated gusto.

Two days is a long time to talk about feelings. It can get uncomfortable. In fact, the more real we get in personal examples or deeper understanding of someone else’s point of view, the more uncomfortable, but ultimately, what I aim to do with the EX workshop, is show people it’s worthwhile to stay in this state of discomfort if it allows you to understand each other and your consumer in ways you wouldn’t have done before.

I want the teams in the workshops to have an emotionally charged experience themselves so there are props and colours and exercises that often probe deeply into their attitudes and some would argue these are more like group therapy sessions than they are workshops for UX and Design professionals and in a sense that’s true. These teams are typically not where organisations are sick and need therapy, they are vibrant and knowledgeable but even these echelons of creativity are infected with acute corporatitis (also known as infectious organisational paralysis) where they’ve found themselves half courageous and half passionate and the other half has been muddled into stiff language, agile wireframes and rapid prototyping. The EX workshop is like an intensive course of antibiotics to create enthusiasm and reignite that passion.

Everyone should walk out of my EX Workshop a human factor expert with a degree in emotional ergonomics and they will then know how to design their own Wizard of Oz to translate this new confidence in their pre-existent skills into transformative user experience design. IDEO can teach them their Empathic Design method, I only aim to eradicate the corporate culture bacteria that doesn’t let them open their hearts and minds to deeply caring about their consumer’s feelings.

I want them out of there feeling as if they just finished a sauna session (only with more clothes!). Cleansed of the corporate BS and silly Business Prevention Department (JP Nicols TM) objections; relaxed; brave; rejuvenated; supremely passionate and ready to take on the organisation if it won’t let them design and innovate to fit their customers’ emotions.

If all know that if we design to create delight and happiness we’ll all be better off. I can only hope that one day my 5 year old son wouldn’t even know he’s banking or that it was a satisfying happy money invisible experience, as he has just sent 200 pounds to his “New Car Deposit” savings account by simply wishing he drove one like the Top Gear one he’s watching and approving the transfer with a dreamy nod.

You can read more about Emotional Banking here and EX not UX here