Latest / FintechOS Evolv / Designing Banking Around Life Moments, AI and Real Customer Experience

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Designing Banking Around Life Moments, AI and Real Customer Experience · FintechOS Evolv

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Welcome back to the FintechOS podcast, Evolve. Delighted to have my latest two
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guests on the show today.
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James Buchanan, the founder of Hidden Strategies, ex-Designit, ex-Wipro, ex-Aviva,
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and our first ever returning guest, Byron Levin, the head of pre-sales at FintechOS.
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Thank you very much. Yeah, both in your own way, shaping the way financial
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services now are dealing with what is our subject topic today of course customer
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experience so welcome to you both delighted to have you both here long history
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great seven eight odd years i think
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we've known each other now so indeed together in a few old shops of mine.
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Designed some great customer journeys, some great customer experiences in the
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world of financial institutions, but now you're also doing amazing things outside the industry, PepsiCo,
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Virgin, I won't steal all your funds, I'm sure you'll want to tell a few stories,
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but I guess James, we'll start with you.
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And I guess the opening question would be, what are you starting to see,
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you know, firstly, I guess, outside of the industry of financial services around
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customer experience and innovation is starting to shape that customer journey.
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And then maybe bring it back into how you're taking those learnings from outside
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the industry and bring them into the world of banking and openly financial institutions
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and making those innovations and customer experiences far better.
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All right. Well, thanks, Mark. And thanks for having me on. It's a real pleasure.
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But yeah, to take that question, I am fascinated by people that are using technology
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to solve genuinely knotty problems.
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It's a bit less interesting when people are just trying to optimize something
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that's already there. But when someone takes something that's genuinely difficult
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and then tries to make it a bit more easy to navigate, a bit easier to get to
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a better place, I think that's really exciting.
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And so we did a lot of work in travel. Yeah.
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Back in last year, and we looked at a lot of different travel services.
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And there's one out there, Mindtrip. And it's a lovely little tool.
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They're using AI, and they're using it to help you decide where might be an
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interesting place to go on holiday. Because I think there is a problem.
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If you start browsing down the list of places you could fly to,
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you pick a place, it's not too expensive that day, you can't find a hotel,
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you go back to the beginning.
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What you really want to say is, where might be like that?
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You know, I wanted to go to Berlin in May. What else might be like Berlin in May?
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And Mindtrip does that. And they'll sort of coach you through this lovely little
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chat. They'll come up with potential itineraries for you.
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And then you'll explore a few of them that are, and it'll surprise you, you know?
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And so if you're thinking about traveling somewhere, it's a,
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it's a lovely thing. It makes it fun.
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It's not like a, not just like a list of dates and, and, and, and locations.
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It's not having about 12 different websites open up, trying to manage and build
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your own trip. You can just do it in this kind of conversational style.
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Yeah. It's, it's lovely. And you know, it's, it's complicated and they make it fun.
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Um, so I think that's one. If only they paid for it as well.
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That'd be, that'd make him better.
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Yeah. Well, quite. But yeah, it's a very tempting thing. It makes you want to travel.
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But then the other one is closer to financial services.
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I like it, as I say, when people take on something that's hard rather than just
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doing what's already there.
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There's a business called Sensilo,
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which has been founded recently by a friend, a guy called Adam Amos.
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Adam's a legend. and he has seen the amount of stress in the UK about paying
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for education, paying for tuition fees, all of the scandals that be going on
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with the interest rates, stuff like that.
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He's looked at some of the challenges that people have thinking about education,
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if they're going to private school and then university, but also just saving for university.
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And he's building financial planners to help people get through that.
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And I just think that's a lovely way of doing it rather than saying,
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hey, what's your future?
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Let's take something really deep and difficult and knotty
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and then solve that in a really nice way so i'd say
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sensilo i think that's an interesting business yeah and i
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guess you that element
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of personalization that is
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included there you're starting to see it in the world of financial services
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banking right yeah well i think you need to first think about what what is an
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what is an experience for someone like what makes an experience and what someone's
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trying to achieve the traveling one i think is particularly interesting because it used to be a very like.
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Research heavy and like you said like all of the experiences are
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kind of the same it's you know it's dates and times and like
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some of the new experiences that are coming out now you mentioned
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it's like i want to feel like x in
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june you know i want to feel the sand and
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i want to feel the air and then you get a service that goes
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and finds oh you might want to maybe you want to go to the maldives and
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here are some options and like you're not searching for travel
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anymore you're like designing your own experience that's
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coming and i think these are like more of the direction
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that the world is moving into um and
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like moving a little bit more into a couple other examples i've
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seen um in uh
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uk home uh you know property uh searching
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especially for um for new families you know you want to search around and there's
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so many of the usual questions you're trying to answer you know where should
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you live are you close to a good school what's the rating and then And we came
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across a real estate agent that had this integrated map that just pinpointed
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down exactly the areas you should live,
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depending on nurseries and schools and school ratings.
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And that just didn't exist as an experience before. It doesn't actually exist
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anywhere else. There's only one place.
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And so, like, the whole experience of, like, you know, not a street that you
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want to live on, but, like, the area and the environment you want to find yourself
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in is just supported by this new experience.
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So it was quite a couple of interesting examples that just came across recently,
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but looking a little bit more into, uh, financial services, I think we see some of the usual, um,
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or some of the leading suspects really kind of pioneering a lot of the new,
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uh, experiences or expectations of experiences, particularly Monzo,
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um, as one example, I think they're, uh.
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One of the real leaders pioneering what
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a modern banking experience should look like for consumers from basic things
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like adding pictures and names to your savings targets to just integrated experiences
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that kind of lead you through your daily financial services life as opposed
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to some of the legacy type experience,
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which are very kind of transactional in nature, you know.
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And so, yeah, I think they're probably one of the better examples.
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I always like when you demo FintechOS to people, especially in the mortgage
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segment, and we have that integrated view into Zoopla.
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And we always talk about when do people start looking for a mortgage?
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Is it when they've found the house or is it when they're looking for the house? Yeah.
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I always find that experience is always interesting. And it gets such good feedback.
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Well, this is the question you have to ask. It's like, where does the experience
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begin? And like, how do you then capture someone at that moment in time where
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they have that initial thought?
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Can you capture them there and take them through this? Like,
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you know, like you mentioned, like we call it, you know, the home buying journey
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or experience. You don't want to, you don't want to just get a mortgage.
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You want to, you know, you want to buy a house. You want to move in.
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You may want to, you know, get some pets. You may want to do all of these things.
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And actually, if you're a financial services provider, you now need to think
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about how do you deliver a solution to that person at that particular stage
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of their life and to the particular lifestyle that they live in.
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And there are a lot of parallels in mortgages and maybe in small business,
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small business landings.
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I don't know if you see something similar in other kind of industries.
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Yeah, well, I think one of the interesting things that I feel is that maybe
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there was a time when some of the financial services homes were sort of ambitious
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earlier in that journey.
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If I think back, Aviva did an advertising campaign with Adam and Eve back in
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2016 that was about facing your future.
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And it was a big big national ad campaign
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they got a got a guy and
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a guy and a woman dress them up as they would be
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when they were old okay yeah and had them live
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as if they had saved the money that
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they are saving and one of them had done all right and the other one was like
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this has not worked out very well and i think the interesting thing about that
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though is they were trying to say at the time like they were trying to reach
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out to people that were not already thinking about pensions yeah and i think
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one of the interesting things is that if i look at a lot of design work recently in financial services.
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A lot of it is for people that have already decided that they want to engage.
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Whereas I think this question about the house is super interesting.
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Like when do people start thinking about their pension? When do people start
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thinking about investing?
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And can you play a role as a designer or as a financial services provider, as an insurer?
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Can you play a role in provoking that interest?
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I'm super interested to see what Monzo does next in that space.
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I would love to see them be ambitious about waking people up,
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not just serving them once they're ready to engage.
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Well, I think that's, it's like a very interesting point. You mentioned like
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people who are already engaged, if you're not, how do you get to people that
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are not engaged and for like pensions or savings or investing,
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it's usually quite a long-term endeavor.
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And so it's difficult for a lot of people to see further into the future.
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Um monzo actually launched uh this uh
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1p savings challenge i don't know maybe
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you've seen it yeah yeah it's like you know such a simple yet
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effective concept for people who don't have a habit of
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saving it's like you know you think oh everyone can save 1p a
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day but then it's like just it's just that hook that
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gets you engaged and then you realize um and
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then you're like oh well actually they're doing something that's quite useful for me
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and so they build out kind of the stickiness of that relationship um
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over time and banking relationships tend to
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be very long very very i
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like how that's been tied into that that purchase
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of a first-time buyer and you
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know actually saving for that deposit and start to how how quickly do you engage
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that that that first on that savings journey and so you you capture what their
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ambition is up front what kind of house you want to live where do you want to
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live and then it kind of works backwards so if you want to fulfill that dream,
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this is the kind of level of deposit you need to start to work towards and how
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we're going to help you achieve that I mean we've been doing a lot of work in
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the building site space and that kind of concept so you've almost before they even.
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Reach an age to even buy, you've already started to engage them in that life
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moment that is coming. Yeah.
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Yeah. I think that's super interesting because I mean, one thing that we've
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seen again and again, uh, with some of these financial planning services is
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that people are terrified of them, right?
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Like it's, it's, it's genuinely scary to think about what might happen to you in 20 years time.
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Um, but if you can, if you can help people do that in a, in a nice way,
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like we used to talk about can you daydream about the future
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and then let's work out the future you're going to have right that that's
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so there's so that's so less threatening it's so it's
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so it's so less anxiety provoking and i i just i just feel like there's just
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a ton of space to do more interesting work there and if if if ai can be part
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of that if if that can if that kind of personalization can lead to people seeing
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themselves seeing their future yeah develop i think that can be really Well, when you're like,
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I think as a provider, you need to think about like what kind of,
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what's the nature of the relationship you want to have with your customers and
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what type of experience can help you deliver this kind of engagement with your customers.
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If you want to build credibility with your customer, what kind of experience builds trust?
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What kind of experience builds different kinds of, I forgot the word.
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Like a culture or like what kind of culture are you trying to deliver?
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Is it like a culture of speed? Is it a culture of trust? Is it a culture of care?
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And the experiences you design can then determine how customers perceive your brand.
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I mean, we saw it like in….
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The investment management space there was this big culture of um
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you know like speed to invest open your account in
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minutes you know just start investing thousands
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of pounds and then the engagement was really high in the beginning but the conversion
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was really low because it's like a very big decision for people to for people
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to make and so actually experiences started you know going um becoming a little
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bit more hybrid they would sort of start digital and then at some point You
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would want to speak to someone,
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understand this kind of, you know, big life moment.
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Maybe you're investing your, you know, entire life savings and you don't want
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to just press a button and do that automatically.
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And so as an experienced designer, you need to consider, um,
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how you then create that right moment to build that trust so that they do actually
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invest with you and you, you have a long-term experience.
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You have a long-term customer. I mean, even in mortgages, you see it now.
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It's like, you need to design experiences for brokers because people don't want
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to make such a big decision on their own.
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Yeah. But Byron, I love that point. Like, you know, it's like the design needs
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to be appropriate to the weight of decision being taken, right? Yeah.
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And it's not- You said that much better than I could have.
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Yeah. I got to summarize- He's a designer. What do you expect? Yeah.
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Not from financial services, but the other day, I signed up to trial a meditation app, right?
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This thing is meant to be the most calming- Being a founder leads you to those
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type of apps, by the way, right?
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It's the stress of being a founder. You must have a meditation.
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I had a minute. I wanted to explore this thing. There was a free trial available,
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so I tried this thing out, and I went to sign up for it.
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I started filling in the form, and then a little timer appeared,
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and it was counting me down.
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It was saying, if I did not complete the sign-up within 10 minutes,
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then I would have to start it again. That is no good for meditation.
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I was thinking, this is not very calm.
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And I was just thinking, and it's similar, right? It's like,
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put all of your life savings down now.
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We'll enable you to do it in five seconds. This does not feel right.
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Let's do this in a measured way. Yeah, it's interesting, because in financial
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services, you always have this this race to the speed of decision,
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race to speed of funding and money.
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And it's relevant for certain products, but actually that...
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That kind of reflect moment take a
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take a breath have a think um especially
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when we're talking about lovely investments you're talking about
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i i think it takes a quite a bold
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um kind of innovation to
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to move away from the speed i must do it now i
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must do it now in that just because all your competitors are
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doing that for somebody to pull back go you know actually i
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know we're going to pull back on purpose and i
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know you know there's there's a there's a part of that story i'll love you to
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tell in a minute but that that natural part it makes you feel like there's a
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human element there's a there's a caring it's actually i'm i'm i'm just as invested
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in your decision as you are and i want you to take that time yeah yeah yeah
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exactly it's kind of like you know it's uh,
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You're showing the consumer that you understand them, what they're trying to
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achieve, and designing, like you said, designing the kind of appropriate experience.
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And the one you're kind of referring to is the one in years gone before,
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I was working on designing an investment management or onboarding experience
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where customers could kind of start on an online experience.
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It's very engaging. It has a lot of scale.
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Um but before getting to the point of making a decision uh
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there was kind of like a intentional pause where
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they could then go offline and in the coming days
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you know receive a letter in the post with you know
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with a teabag in true british form and and
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the whole concept was like you know take a minute think about
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your decision it's a big decision um consider it and then they would come back
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you know with this level of kind of like trust um and then make that decision
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so you'd get much higher conversions yeah um at the end which is which is a
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much more long term so you drive a much higher conversion and actually they
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probably invest more because,
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there's some thought in it actually you've built that that trust with the consumer,
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yeah actually a race just to put some money down if i
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if i put myself in that in the the shoes of that
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customer i would have put as little as i possibly could down and
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it would have i would of trialed it yeah i probably left it there actually
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having a tea bag to me you gotta make tea on us kind
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of notion i think it's quite novel yeah well that
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was yeah it was kind of the it was a bit of a novel kind of you
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know experiment really at that time but i think
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now a lot like a lot of the reason for that is largely rooted in like confidence
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is sort of rooted in understanding and knowledge yeah and now with um with access
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to information that everybody has yeah mainly through a lot of the new AI services
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or capabilities that may.
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That may change over time i don't know if you're seeing a lot
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of uh i don't know if you're seeing a lot happening
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in kind of the consumer brand space around ai or
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i mean in financial services we're seeing a lot of like
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the early research moving to ai tools and agents yeah i get a few use first
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use cases now come in um but in stereo for the world of banking we're never
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going to be in the the cutting edge of it uh it's interesting with you working
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in different industries you're You're probably seeing more innovative stuff
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and actually people implementing it.
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Ah, I don't know. I mean, I think it's patchy, right?
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But there are parts of travel that it's built for AI, right?
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Like I talk about Mindtrip, and you can see that Virgin Atlantic have a concierge
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in their app now that's AI enabled. It's pretty nice.
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I think one of the interesting questions will be how some of the capabilities
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and some of the, I suppose, the expectations that have been set by people playing around with ChatGPT,
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then show up in some of the more familiar places where they actually do their shopping.
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Now, I mean, I don't know. I still think if you're buying your groceries on
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a weekly basis, you're still going to buy it from a grocer.
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I think the interesting question is how does that AI show up in Ocado,
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in Tesco, to just make that
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a much more enjoyable and much more inspiring and
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much more you know like just enable you to do more during
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your shop i don't see a future at the
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moment where everyone's doing all their grocery shopping through a
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single a single platform that seems crazy to me so so
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you know maybe maybe more on the travel because you don't shop that regularly
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but your things like your regular grocery i'm just really excited to see what
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some of those uh what some of those stores make of it yeah are you is Is there
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like a blend between the type of experience we've been talking about so far,
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and where is the customer's expectation going to be?
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So are you seeing that the customer's expectation is still lesser than what
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we've talked about? Or is it just people expect it now? That's the level.
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If you're not up to scratch, then I'll go next door, I'll go to the next person.
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Well, I'd say one of the funny things, I mean, it's an obvious point,
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and obviously everyone in financial services will be familiar with this problem.
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The easiest company to be right now is a startup who's decided to design itineraries.
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You start trying to match those itineraries to
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actual flights on an actual flight booking platform and
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then try and organize the actual hotel stays and have
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it all connect up with like a nice neat no drop-offs no one losing their booking
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at the last minute it's a lot harder yeah you know so it's easy to be mind trip
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it's a lot harder to work out how to be you know a mind trip quality experience
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on top of a legacy stack yeah so i think that's probably where the gap comes
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you You know, people get used to, you know,
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liquid fast exploration, but then it's a little more complicated to actually make the bookings.
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Do you think there's maybe like, because like I said, everyone's going like
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the initial stage, super fast.
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Research is kind of really easy.
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But do you think there's also a risk that it's like, there's just too much information
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for consumers to even understand?
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Like you go to ChatGPT or another service and they just like,
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you know, I want to go to Brazil. And then they've got seven pages,
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the whole history of South America before they could even understand what they want to do.
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Like, is it actually a good experience now?
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Or like, how do you see that from a consumer perspective?
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Well, the way we've seen people using some of these tools in research is the
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central conceit of it being a chat is what makes it comprehensible, right?
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No matter how much information there is, like a conversation,
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no matter how much experience you two have, there's only so much of it you can
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say at once, there's only so much of it I can take in at once, right?
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And that's the limiter. And I think AI, for all the things that may get wrong,
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that is something it does in a very natural way.
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So I'm not sure it's an overabundance that's the problem.
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I think that for important things, people will, for a long time, struggle to trust it.
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And I think for a long time, it will struggle to deal with some of the integration
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into some of the systems that it actually needs to work with in order to get things done.
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And I think that's probably the the bigger barrier for a
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while i like um no we talked to a number of
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banks and financial institutions and you
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know the subject of all always come naturally and
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it's about how what what the capabilities of the fintech os platform around
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ai um and i always find it quite fascinating depending on who the actors are
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in in the room but there's a whole bunch of ai use cases around just basically
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reviewing information and presenting it in a way that is fit for an underwriter or
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for a lender, or doing financial analysis, and automation.
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But then you get into some more of the innovative stuff around,
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I want to launch a product to this type of segment.
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I want the product to have these type of features or actually not even saying that,
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but what kind of features should it have to entice this audience and into this
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segment and having that conversational tool and then having a platform that
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will start to build the product for you based on two or three prompts.
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And then you say in this conversational style, you can continue digging down,
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digging down, digging down.
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And that becomes, you know, product managers or product
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owners into that kind of conversation i go oh wow because i
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this takes weeks to put together these type
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of new product and procedure plans um
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but actually i can do it in this kind of style and you can start not only
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yeah giving me the insight around stuff i don't know
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also you start building the the core product
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as well that's that's yeah well this i mean this is what most
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people are asking us now when we're going through banks or
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insurers or other customers in financial services
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that like maybe maybe last year the question was kind
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of like primarily efficiency driven it's like
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you know how can this help me be like a little bit faster more efficient
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the typical like automation story um
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but i think we we've kind of like we've crossed a bridge and now the conversation
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is like i know it's going to make me more efficient but how can it also make
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me better how can i get like new ideas for a product that i didn't think about
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how can i come up with new offers for this customer segment that I didn't think about before.
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And we just talked about kind of the limiting factor of individuals with these
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kind of capabilities. The limits are,
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you know, largely infinite, you can come up with many, many,
24:58
many more ideas than you could possibly come up with on your own.
25:02
And I think that's going to unlock a new level of kind of creativity in how
25:07
products are created and distributed.
25:09
And I hope not just creativity, but also reality, right?
25:12
Because, you know, I mean, we've all seen a lot of money invested in developing
25:16
products that people do not go on to use, right?
25:19
We have seen, you know, it's probably more like
25:22
more than a decade ago now but that that wave of kind
25:25
of extremely configurable home insurance
25:28
like did the did consumers really want that i'm not
25:31
sure they did like if if if companies had been
25:34
able to prototype quickly get things
25:37
in front of customers quickly without costing a
25:40
lot of money that would have saved an awful lot of investment so i'm
25:43
excited by that like i i guess you know one of
25:46
the things we talk to clients a lot about is the danger
25:50
of getting their thinking stuck in the middle by having
25:52
it kind of just live in decks and just live in theory like we
25:56
like we like real real research with
25:59
people we like prototypes and we like
26:02
people to be super creative and come up with uh you know
26:04
impossibly imaginative ideas we're not super
26:08
bothered about those slides that kind of sit in the middle and kind of so yeah
26:12
so more prototyping all to the good yeah i guess you always hear this buzzwords
26:17
around like human centric across banking and and other industries and i think
26:23
we've kind of started touching it already around where are those natural,
26:27
marriage points between whether it's an ai agent or it's an ai enabled platform.
26:34
Or it's just a digital and still bringing that human touch point together i
26:40
mean you've touched it a couple of times and even you're buying around in banking
26:44
but that's not going away is it?
26:48
It's got to stay the human element.
26:52
Well, yeah, I mean, I think it's definitely something that's going to stick around for a while,
26:57
I think, but I just think the nature of these relationships are going to change
27:01
and like who owns, like who owns the customer experience going back to like,
27:06
where does the experience stop?
27:07
Yeah, now we're seeing like customers are very, like their knowledge and understanding
27:13
is increasing with the use of AI tools.
27:18
This is where like a lot of the research, like the research phase is happening.
27:22
And then the question is, who then owns that experience?
27:25
I think just last week or this week, there was the first OpenAI insurance policy
27:31
integration. So you go to OpenAI, I want to get a policy.
27:36
There it is. It's all in, you know, you don't need to leave that experience.
27:38
So now the question is who owns that experience?
27:41
Because you're not just at the research phase and you're actually at like the
27:44
purchase or whatever execution phase now.
27:47
And I think that's going to continue. So the question like, do you build an
27:51
experience that's integrated into some, um.
27:56
Primary ai experience or do do
27:59
customers still have multiple various experiences for other
28:02
for other cases i don't know i think
28:05
yeah you know talking to banks and also where you
28:08
where you i think where you're going to get the biggest
28:11
successes is where you can enable both
28:15
both the customers and and the institution with this level
28:18
of ai and technology but it also helps um
28:22
the sales agents and the back office folk do
28:25
their be way more efficient themselves and give
28:28
them the insight as well like tell me something i didn't know that that
28:31
for me is really really powerful and how do you enable the branches
28:35
still exist you know how do you enable those folk as well um
28:38
how can you switch between not just
28:41
an omni channel approach now but it's an omni with an ai element channel
28:44
yeah how do you start switching between them how does it remain bank assistant how
28:48
can you start and stop and continue and take that cup of
28:51
tea moment yeah yeah exactly well i mean you're probably seeing
28:54
a lot of like the a agent experience
28:57
optimization as well coming up now yeah i i'm gonna i'm gonna go back to mark's
29:04
mark's question about human centric though because i think there's a there's
29:07
a there's a little bit of the industry that's perhaps tempted to imagine human
29:13
centric as being without the humans in some places you know.
29:18
Things that are boring, things that require a bit too much admin.
29:21
Perhaps they can just be dealt with by machines.
29:23
But I guess I,
29:26
I feel that there's been a deficit of engagement with some of these knotty questions.
29:33
And I feel that they are sources of anxiety for people.
29:37
And so I'd like to think that these new tools will be ways in which banks and
29:44
other institutions can be more human.
29:47
And I think perhaps even, perhaps even, you know, maybe if they have efficiencies
29:53
in one place, shift more people to the front line.
29:55
I'd love to see more people talking to other people, enabled by great tools.
30:00
And so I suppose that's my hopeful thought about human centricity and how financial
30:07
services might turn out.
30:08
I know there's going to be thoughts about things moving the other way, automating more.
30:13
Making things frictionless, but to me that
30:16
world just sounds like a place where things happen without people
30:19
realizing it you know and uh and some of the useful friction
30:22
of uh of of people making decisions and
30:25
figuring things out will be lost so yeah i'm i'm
30:28
on the human side yeah well we talk about it a lot with mortgage like with mortgages
30:33
and we talk about like well who as a as a lender or bank or building society
30:39
then who like who is your primary customer and like of course there's a customer
30:42
but when you talk about some products like mortgages we we talk about like,
30:46
the broker is kind of like your customer you need to design
30:49
an experience for them because they are having this
30:52
conversation with customers that's building that
30:55
trust so that they can actually become a customer of
30:59
you so you've got like multiple customers you need to think about designing
31:02
the right experience for um and again that's like kind of what you said earlier
31:08
on the the experience needs to match the um the persona what you're trying to
31:13
deliver so yeah There's definitely a human role,
31:16
but I think just the nature in which they engage is definitely changing.
31:21
I don't think we can ignore that.
31:23
So all this is out there. You're seeing it in industries outside of financial
31:27
institutions. We're seeing it certainly in banking as well.
31:32
Let's lean into the negative, right? What's stopping people, right?
31:37
So is it, I don't know, outdated technology? Is it their own culture?
31:46
Is it just some legacy stuff that's stopping people?
31:50
I'll hold banking back for a minute.
31:55
The people you engage with, possibly slightly different culture maybe than from banking, possibly.
32:02
Maybe more forward thinking possibly but what's stopping them or is it the same problems,
32:10
Well, I think it's, I don't know if it's exactly the same problems,
32:13
but it's often similar patterns.
32:15
And I think the, you know, if you like, the fundamental pattern that gets in the way of this,
32:23
I think, of making progress on some of these issues is people lacking a language
32:29
or a shared framework to collaborate with people from a different group, right?
32:34
And that could be, you know.
32:39
Say the front office or the sales team talking a certain way and the data team
32:46
or the tech team wanting to define things in a different way.
32:49
That can be a real barrier. You know that within banks.
32:52
Same exists within other kinds of businesses.
32:55
But it can also be, you know, if we look at a startup that we work with in the
33:01
facility industry, and they're trying to change the way the whole ecosystem works.
33:05
So they're super aligned internally.
33:08
What they've got to do is work out how to align between them,
33:12
between clinics, between the NHS, between a whole range of, and to be able to
33:16
explain to each of these people what they're doing and why some of these changes
33:20
might be in everyone's interests.
33:23
This isn't a can we invent it in AI question, it's a can we create a shared
33:28
way of thinking and talking and getting things down on paper that enables us
33:33
to actually make progress on some of these questions.
33:36
And I guess that's the fundamental pattern that we see again and again.
33:39
It just looks a bit different in banking, looks a bit different in femtech,
33:43
looks a bit different in travel, you know.
33:46
Yeah, I think you're right. I mean, I think the fundamental approach to designing
33:50
experiences as a way to achieve some kind of goal is still the same.
33:54
I think we're just at a new, there's this new wave of AI capabilities that's
34:01
kind of struck at this moment in time that's getting people thinking about many,
34:07
many very real and important questions.
34:10
And we shouldn't forget that it's only like four years in roughly like since you know,
34:16
anyway since like the chat gpt public moment it's like only four years maybe
34:20
five you might argue it's like not a very long time yeah um and so i think the
34:24
challenge is people figuring out what this change means and means for them and
34:30
that's going to take some time for people to figure out their own reality of
34:33
what these changes mean um,
34:35
um for them and for their businesses and then as james mentioned how do you
34:40
then apply these capabilities to certain yeah um context or experiences when
34:45
they do and don't and don't make sense so you get kind of you fundamentally
34:48
set yourself up culturally from an organizational point of view speaking the
34:53
right language actually truly understands what they're trying to achieve.
34:56
And then you kind of get yourself aligned and
34:59
then you look at maybe your technology stack and you go have that
35:02
old crap moment how the hell are we going to do this how is this
35:05
all this new age stuff going to fit into yeah this
35:08
this legacy piece that's been hanging around for 70 years
35:11
i'm blowing the cobwebs off as we speak and i
35:14
guess you know platforms like you know fintech that
35:17
you you help implement how they can start to shape and yeah be that enabler
35:23
for that change without having to you know worry about the legacy that's behind
35:28
you well i think this yeah i think it's probably even more important in today's
35:33
world in various industries that are heavily regulated.
35:37
Of course, financial services is one of those. And a lot of experiences up until
35:41
now have been largely sort of utilitarian in nature or quite fixed experiences
35:47
because there was a lot of regulation around them.
35:49
And so when you're a bank or lender in this situation, you then need to look
35:54
to, they need to look to the market to find suitable providers that can deliver
36:00
this kind of capability in an enterprise way. And that's where I think,
36:05
Um, we're probably moving to like a little bit more of a, um.
36:10
A little bit more of a platform world than a kind of, you know,
36:13
the typical point solution world, because you need some kind of more flexibility
36:16
to deliver these solutions in a world that's changing so fast and continues
36:21
to change and will continue.
36:23
Yeah. But I think the timing is quite, quite good as well, because there's the, uh,
36:27
I think the mills review is just being published this week or it's kind of around
36:32
about now, which just like the government response to how AI is affecting or
36:37
might affect financial services.
36:39
So I think coming out of that will perhaps be a set of guidelines or approaches that people can follow.
36:46
And when people have, you know, some kind of guidance or structure,
36:49
it might help, you know, things progress a bit more.
36:54
I can remember back a few years now, James,
36:57
you know, being in a room with you back in design at times where you take a
37:04
room full of stakeholders across a bank from Exco down to Teller,
37:10
right, the whole spectrum.
37:12
And on a whiteboard you'd effectively design
37:15
out you know the world's your oyster blue sky thinking
37:18
the whole lot we know we start plan and build the
37:22
optimal customer journey for whatever product it is and people come out with
37:27
all kinds of newfangled ways which back then you'd think it's never it's never
37:30
going to work but actually it is your role to bring all that together to produce
37:36
i guess a blueprint for the future state.
37:40
How did you how do you
37:43
manage to do that across that state who was going to have a different view
37:46
everybody's have different priorities and then how
37:49
do you manage the expectation of what is achievable versus
37:52
what is you know a future state that's you
37:54
know three four years possibly done like maybe not
37:57
so much now but coming back a few years that's that's that's a hell of a skill
38:01
but getting people outside of that mindset they only know what they know so
38:05
start thinking from a different lens whether it's uh from in retail or from
38:10
leisure that type of experience how do you how do you bring that out how did
38:15
you bring it out you did it all the time.
38:18
Uh well um i guess it starts from the i guess it starts from the view that,
38:24
everyone in the room knows their business really well and they have a good sense
38:29
of where it's working and where it's not and our job is we do not come in as
38:33
banking experts you know that yeah We come in as people that want to just ask questions and say,
38:40
so how does it work today?
38:44
Which bits seem to work pretty well? Where does it feel slower than it might?
38:49
Where do you see opportunities to add more value for the customer?
38:53
Where do you feel like you're missing a chance to do something great?
38:57
And together we build up a collective story. And you know what?
39:01
Whilst if you ask everyone what's the one thing they want to do,
39:04
they'll all have a different answer.
39:05
But if you get all of the stuff together, their views of how the bank functions,
39:09
you know what? It has a lot in common.
39:11
And everyone will tell you that the six weeks period it takes to get a loan
39:15
signed off is the thing that's really killing the bank.
39:17
Um, and if you can fix that, that'll be 80% of the value, you know?
39:21
So I think that's probably the thing, you know, you, you, you,
39:24
you, you ask the questions, you see the patterns emerge, you know what,
39:28
there's a lot more agreement than there's a lot more agreement than you might expect.
39:31
How do you, how do you just taper people's expectations though?
39:34
When people would come out with, if, if, if it could go from A to Z here or
39:39
there to there, was it about, does it capturing that view versus the reality
39:46
of the achievability of that.
39:48
Well, I think this is a classic problem for anyone doing any kind of strategy work.
39:55
And I think the shape of the answer probably hasn't changed that much in the
39:59
last, I don't know, several decades.
40:02
There's a McKinsey paper that puts it well, you probably want to be putting
40:05
about 70% of your effort on Horizon One work, your core business now,
40:09
20% on Horizon Two, your next big bets and about 10% on Horizon 3.
40:14
And I think being able to sit with everyone in the room and say,
40:17
let's be honest about, let's be honest here and say, what are the,
40:20
you know, changing that six week period that feels pretty Horizon 1 to me.
40:24
Um, going after that big new market that's adjacent to the one you're already
40:27
successful in, yeah, that feels Horizon 2, but you only get to try out a few
40:31
of the things in Horizon 3.
40:33
And, and, and I guess that's, you know, going all the way back.
40:36
People will often want to talk about the horizon three bit, but you've got to
40:40
put it in context that 90% of what you're going to be spending your money on,
40:43
if not more, let's be honest, is horizon one and two.
40:46
And I think getting that reality and then finding the agreement there,
40:51
that's all right. People get it.
40:53
It takes a few cycles. You don't try and do it all in one workshop.
40:56
Yeah, I think it's exactly right. I mean, we kind of sit and talk a lot about
41:01
the future of customer experiences and AI and how it's going to shape experiences.
41:07
And we then actually get, you know, you have to get quite practical with a lot
41:12
of, a lot of the market has what you might consider relatively basic needs.
41:18
But those needs have a very real business impact on them.
41:23
You know, if they can just unblock that six-week approval process for a loan,
41:27
they can increase their lending.
41:29
And, you know, that's going to have a positive economic impact on the banks.
41:33
I think sometimes we need to, probably me, you know, stop all some of the blue
41:39
sky thinking and just… Did you say probably you?
41:42
I was thinking about you.
41:46
But yeah, there are actually some very real needs that you can kind of,
41:49
you know, you don't need to look so far out, but there are some very real value that can be captured.
41:57
We're talking about value creation and capture earlier on that can be captured
42:02
for this kind of tier of banks and lenders and building societies just by enhancing
42:08
some of their core operations.
42:09
Yeah, and it's a pretty good clue where you're going to find the agreement as
42:13
well, because if it's causing a problem for lots and lots of people in the bank,
42:17
then they're all going to agree they want to fix it.
42:19
And because it's causing a
42:21
problem for all of them, there's going to be a ton of value in fixing it.
42:23
So, yeah, to an extent, it does it itself. You just got to ask the questions.
42:27
It's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
42:30
Even from, you know, six, seven, eight years ago, when we had an old shop working dealer.
42:37
Things have moved on so much now and technology platforms have become such enablers
42:43
of this, the ability to integrate with, you know, vast amount of third parties,
42:49
the elements of the data orchestration that can go in and the insights that
42:53
can be provided out of it for these types of journeys.
42:56
I mean, even from that has moved on so much now.
43:00
So, you know, to have a platform that can enable that, whether it's a mortgage
43:07
journey, whether it's an SME loan journey, whether it's a travel site.
43:12
If your platform, or you haven't got a platform that enables that,
43:17
I feel you might be kind of living in the dark ages a little bit.
43:21
Well, yeah, if you don't have a platform with this kind of capability that can
43:24
connect to just about any third-party service you need,
43:29
it's going to be very difficult to design and implement this kind of experience
43:33
that can really unlock this kind of business value, let alone take advantage
43:36
of a lot of these new AI capabilities.
43:38
So you have to have a platform with a data layer or data platform in place that
43:45
can expose those capabilities.
43:47
So you can then build the right products or solutions or offers and experiences on top of that.
43:54
I think without that, it's... It sounds complicated.
43:57
So I'm not a developer. I'm not that way inclined. I believe I'm not.
44:02
I really did not. but it sounds complicated right so if you're talking to a
44:08
bank or a building site or maybe a smaller bank that don't have.
44:13
Vast amounts of engineers and developers and think
44:16
oh my god how the hell am i going to do this right and
44:19
we talk about this low code no code element which still
44:23
kind of sounds a little bit complicated how how am i going to
44:25
manage this how do i how do i start to own these experiences and these these
44:31
journeys myself rather than have to rely on you know other people to to manage
44:37
it for me because that that's cost that's a lot of cost yeah well i think it's
44:41
you've got to start again at the business value of what you're trying to do and achieve,
44:45
you know, what's the solution you want to deliver?
44:48
Uh, how do you, you know, through what experience do you want to deliver that
44:51
solution and this kind of, um, platform capability should enable that.
44:56
And that platform then kind of abstracts away that technical complexity.
45:01
So you really should just be having kind of business value or focus conversation.
45:06
But I'd say what has changed a bit, well, um.
45:10
Yes, the tech has changed, but organizations' understanding of tech has also changed.
45:16
Like even in sort of smaller financial institutions, um, there's,
45:21
you've got people working there who have been through a few of these before, right? Yeah, yeah.
45:25
They know what, they know what can work, they know what might go wrong. Yeah.
45:28
So there's that maturity there. And I think also on the platform side, and you know,
45:32
uh, there's probably, I think, I think some of those platforms appear a bit more legible,
45:36
like it's easier to map into blueprints and
45:39
work out where they fit what processes they support
45:43
than it might have been in the past so i feel that combination of
45:46
kind of like embedded institutional knowledge
45:49
in the banks and organizations and the ease of use of some of the platforms
45:55
okay you know that it helps each it helps each other out i think yeah i think
46:00
you're right customers knowledge is is improving and we shouldn't underestimate
46:03
the when you say customer you mean a bank a bank Like, yeah,
46:06
yeah, not like an end, but the, you know, the bank and the internal users,
46:10
they're, they know their business very well.
46:12
And we shouldn't underestimate their, their understanding of technology either.
46:17
I think you, I think you mentioned earlier on James about the,
46:20
the, the, the idea of being able to prototype really quick and kind of do that test and learn piece.
46:27
And I think that's incredibly valuable for any business, right?
46:30
Because if you're looking to go to a new market, looking to launch a new product,
46:34
and you just want to see, you want to just get the flavor right and get that initial feedback.
46:39
But if you're on a...
46:43
Is that as difficult as just launch to do product you
46:46
have to have the technology to enable the ability to quickly
46:49
spin up a prototype an mvp quickly
46:53
test and learn and shut it down if it doesn't work or then to build
46:55
upon it if you if if you don't have that flexibility agility
46:59
in a platform where whether you build a fully fledged
47:02
product or a or a pilot it's the same amount of cost same energy
47:05
effort still takes six months and you lose that
47:08
market pace that's that's really
47:11
difficult do you see it in your world then you see
47:14
the technology is there to be quite agile outside of financial services well
47:17
we get i mean we look we go when we say prototype we mean
47:20
everything from a paper prototype that we
47:22
want to put in front of customers and have them just make sense of yeah to you
47:26
know a mock-up that we put on instagram to see how people react to it to you
47:31
know i was once designing a a kid's banking product and we we mocked it up um
47:37
with a fake e money with a rough e-money account and a couple of devices,
47:42
but you know, there was nothing solid there.
47:45
And then by the time you actually get to build the thing, you've been through
47:48
maybe, you know, five progressive versions of it.
47:52
So I think when people say prototype, they've got to be, you know,
47:54
what fidelity are we talking about?
47:55
We like to go through all the fidelities and we tend to find that each.
48:01
Cheaper one that you do saves you money on the next one so i think my you know
48:05
i'm expecting to go through two or three rounds of prototyping before we get
48:08
anywhere near a live system yeah but i i completely agree if you're able to
48:11
go from that kind of like you know relatively rough.
48:16
Alpha kind of prototype to something live pretty quickly
48:18
that would be the difference between and i think
48:21
in a lot of organizations that would be the difference between the project
48:24
happening and not happening because what you don't want is a massive
48:27
step up from it costs you you know 100k to do one
48:30
prototype and 5 million to do the next stage you know that's that's
48:33
a very difficult yeah we think
48:36
about it from uh from a product perspective you mentioned earlier
48:40
on the like the kind of universal home product
48:43
like very flexible insurance product like if it takes
48:46
you a very long time to like to the r&d and
48:49
deliver that product you could only do that so many
48:51
times in some but this is why you need
48:54
when the world is changing um at
48:58
the rate that it's changing now you need the ability to
49:01
iterate through various um products product types
49:04
product variations offers bundles of products or solutions so then if you know
49:09
if the if the cost and effort is not so great you can scale that up until you
49:14
find the right combinations that work if you can only do that once in a year
49:18
then like of course it's going to take you ages because you're going to try
49:21
and get it perfect before you launch it, because you can never change it again.
49:24
And the worst thing is to get that one thing away. You've had to get so much
49:27
senior buy-in as you go. You can't really then row back and say,
49:31
I'm not sure it was right. You know?
49:32
Like, it creates all the wrong incentives.
49:35
Really difficult to fail. It just ruins your credibility and your momentum.
49:40
And I just think in the world of...
49:42
Uh financial services where you are it's
49:46
such a competitive environment um and
49:49
you're trying always trying to find that usp and what is your edge and
49:53
that usually is some form of feature of some sort
49:56
right or it's some form of bundling together we talked about
49:58
you know actually what you've got that in that life moment how
50:01
can you bring three or four products together but if you can't be agile enough
50:06
to push that into the market really quickly you've you've missed the boat and
50:09
if you want to do it you're competitive down the road yeah yeah yeah and it
50:12
could be just a very you know it could be like a cashback it'd go oh it's just
50:16
a feature you know we have a hundred pounds cashback and there's no conversion
50:19
but oh no can you just change that to,
50:21
110 can you change it to 150 and then all of a sudden maybe that's the difference
50:24
but you don't know if you can't test that out very quickly and then having the
50:28
the data analytics behind it,
50:30
that helps you enable that decision because if
50:33
you don't know where the drop-offs are where people are skipping
50:36
that or stopping at that element and you can't then
50:38
feed that back into a loop of continuous improvement yeah
50:42
yeah again well not to take it back full circle to
50:44
ai but you know then you have your agent which is like hey what's what's working
50:48
here what's not working what can i what can i not yeah yeah see see the hidden
50:54
spaces see the see the white space in your proposition that you haven't you
50:58
know that's what's going to help people get get better at least that's what
51:00
i and only what underpins.
51:04
All of these experiences really is this currency of data, right?
51:11
I just call it a currency now because I think it's worth more than money.
51:14
If you can use it correctly and you can drive insight out of it,
51:18
the world's going to be a better place.
51:19
And we talk about AI so much, but if it's not powered by good,
51:24
reliable, clean data, then you're not going to get the right outcomes.
51:28
And institutions we all work with sit on so much data that can drive these experiences and these,
51:38
insights and solutions and can almost second guess what you already want i know
51:42
there's an element we won't get into it the kind of trust in it but but ultimately
51:45
that is the power of it have you seen a platform it can can deliver i think
51:49
if people get it right there's there's of course a lot of value in that there
51:52
are a lot of questions around who owns what and when and you,
51:56
how the regulations on that might evolve.
51:59
But I think it's pretty well understood and accepted that if you can make sense
52:05
of the data you have available to you, a lot of these tools just amplify the
52:09
effect that that might have.
52:12
So, yeah, I think there's a lot of value. I mean, it's pretty well understood
52:16
that there's a lot of value there for the people that can deliver the right
52:20
infrastructure to extract the value from the data that they have.
52:26
I still go back to talk about one of the best experiences I ever had with the bank.
52:33
I know I wanted to get the story in. I know you'll love it.
52:37
Back when I was a kid, my dad had worked for NatWest for great.
52:43
He was a lifer, 40 odd years. I did my student at NatWest as well. So shout out to them.
52:50
And he signed me up to a kid's account.
52:53
Right and the first thing that that was
52:56
did was they sent a ceramic pig it
52:59
was in a nappy i forget what its name was i'm sure
53:02
people will remind us it wasn't pepper it wasn't pepper
53:05
it wasn't percy but uh i think
53:08
what it would have been a very old-fashioned name back in the 70s and
53:11
80s so it's a ceramic money box a pig
53:14
and it sticks with me now and i'm you
53:17
know touching nearly 50 i'm going for you going through a few years but it's
53:21
that experience sticks with me now that i had this this this money box from
53:26
natwest i put pounds in or whatever it is back then but only then when you became
53:30
a teenager you upgraded your account and you got the next pig,
53:35
and then you got the next pig after that and you had the end up with a family
53:38
so i had the baby one and the brother and then you finally got the the mother
53:43
and father pigs working you know late teens into the 20s and it grabbed me and
53:48
even to this day now touch 50 my main bank account,
53:54
is natwest uh mortgage natwest the loyalty that that simple.
54:03
Simple thing did for me and then obviously i pass it on to my children and so
54:07
forth so forth but it's simple things like that and there's no ai in that yeah
54:11
yeah that's not about that It's a bit like a teabag story.
54:15
Yeah, yeah. That's what hooked me.
54:19
I don't think there's any doubt that if an institution, be they financial or anything,
54:26
can play a really big role to help you out at either an early formative or stressful
54:32
time, they're going to have a connection with you.
54:35
My bank account is with the bank that I banked with when I had a small business in 2002.
54:43
And we had an amazing bank manager who went out of his way to sort out,
54:48
sorted a few things out for the business, sorted out a mortgage out for me.
54:52
And I have not even thought about shifting ever since.
54:56
I mean, it's not a pig, but it was a moment. I can remember the first time I met him.
55:02
I know exactly what that was like. I mean, imagine if moments like that get lost over time. I know.
55:06
You know, I had probably the anti version of that, which is like at some point
55:10
I had the same bank account for as long as I can remember.
55:14
And then at some point I was like, I'm basically getting nothing from this experience. And so I moved.
55:20
It's like, why would you stay to one of the leading banks now?
55:24
Which is like the experience is just so much better. So like there's these things
55:30
are usually like there's a slow transition.
55:34
I think it's got to depend a little bit on the bigness of the experience,
55:38
I think. The size of the experience, I'm sorry.
55:41
Just to play on the kids bit a little bit, you've got the pig for the bank account.
55:49
I'm still surprised that insurance firms and banks don't do more around early families.
55:57
You know there's a number of things that are going on
56:00
at once you might be moving house you just had a kid you might
56:02
need a new car you got to think about the kid's future
56:05
you got to think about your own future if anything should happen like that's
56:09
a lot of knotty things all together at once and if you i mean other than adam
56:14
who's trying to do something on the education side i don't see a lot of great
56:17
early family financial propositions yeah yeah yeah that's a big opportunity
56:23
well you're right it's interesting you lead me on right so we're coming to a,
56:27
close of the podcast and lead me
56:30
on to what I always like to finish with which is this kind of forward-looking
56:33
view around what's coming up and
56:36
I'll start with you James because you know just across the industries that you
56:41
work in um what are the kind of emerging technologies or even the capabilities
56:47
that you know you're most you are most excited about in the terms of in the
56:52
next two or three years that's coming over that horizon.
56:57
I'm going to say there's an ambition that I see with some of the clients we
57:05
work with, and I love that ambition.
57:08
It goes back to what I said at the beginning. It's when they stop thinking,
57:11
how can we do what we do most efficiently?
57:15
How can we help our customers think more imaginatively about this space that we're in?
57:22
My wife has a fashion label. I love it when you see fashion retail reach out
57:28
and help you think about what goes with what.
57:30
I love the way that fashion retailers will bring in social media in a smart and curated way.
57:35
I love it when I see a grocer, a supermarket, pull in recipes from other places.
57:42
I love the menopause work that Okada have been doing.
57:47
I love it when stores, when companies are just that bit more ambitious about
57:53
what they're putting out there.
57:55
And so I think that, you know, it's not a technology, but it's just,
57:58
I think when, I think companies are looking at AI, they're looking at,
58:02
as you say, the data they've got on their customers and they're saying,
58:06
we can play a bigger role here.
58:08
And I'm hoping that some people in financial services will be looking at,
58:13
say, early families or big moments when things are getting pretty knotty and
58:18
difficult and you've got a lot of decisions to make.
58:20
And I'd like to think that people be ambitious in those moments yeah
58:23
i like that i like that yeah and i think ambition plays a very good part and
58:27
i guess we start to see it a lot in in our world so as the first ever returning
58:33
guest to the sofa i'm gonna i'm gonna have the last word so given a bike we've spoken about um,
58:41
what's if if you're a.
58:43
A bank or a financial institution sitting here watching and listening to this,
58:48
what would be Byron Levin's, you know, one piece of advice you'd give for a
58:55
bank looking to start that kind of journey?
58:59
Well, I think James really kind of touched on a key point. You can't steal his one.
59:08
I was just taking notes. I was about to say exactly. Um, no,
59:12
but I think, you know, principally this idea of creating the right, um,
59:18
proposition which might be one or multiple financial products kind of blended together.
59:24
To address the needs of a group at
59:27
a particular lifestyle or stage is what these organizations
59:30
should be thinking of you know a new family
59:33
has a set of needs and it's not just one product it's
59:36
probably a combination of products and services that a financial services
59:39
organization bank and insurer can deliver to them
59:42
at that point in time or a small business that's
59:45
maybe just trying to expand as another set of needs and how do you
59:48
really take you know it's not just like here's our business account
59:51
and some um you know dedicated relationship
59:54
manager you need to go like a little bit deeper into designing a
59:57
proposition for that group so i think the more they think
1:00:00
about that and then you know kind of arm themselves with
1:00:03
the right infrastructure to deliver that kind of proposition i think that's
1:00:06
kind of the the general direction of travel um outside of that though i do think
1:00:12
there's there should be a big debate of like who owns the ultimate customer
1:00:15
experience especially with these mostly these big ai services integrating these
1:00:21
experiences into their primary.
1:00:24
Kind of workspace so i see like more and more of
1:00:26
that happening like stripe integration into open ai
1:00:29
insurance integrate it's just it's like it's
1:00:32
already happening on the ground and so i think there's like a big ground up
1:00:35
movement that's just going to force this thing to continue you
1:00:38
continuously happen and then you have the question of like who ultimately owns
1:00:42
the customer experience and what does that do to a whole brand narrative and
1:00:46
like what does that actually mean so i don't have an answer but that's just
1:00:50
where i see things kind of moving and that's it'll be interesting to see how
1:00:54
that evolves fantastic well look um.
1:00:58
Thank you both for coming on. Really appreciate it. James, where can the viewers
1:01:03
and listeners find out a bit more about Hidden Strategies?
1:01:07
Oh, just come check the website out. Come find us on LinkedIn.
1:01:10
We'd love to have a chat. Anyone that's got an interesting question,
1:01:13
we'd love to get into it. Fantastic.
1:01:15
Excellent. Thank you both. Thanks for having me. Come back maybe a third time, maybe a second time.
1:01:20
Thanks everybody. Loved it. See you next time. Thanks Mark.