How Design Thinking Transforms Reporting for Financial Service Companies

Remember the jar at home where you saved the coins you received in change?

This simple yet effective method has long served as a convenient way to save money effortlessly. When the jar fills up, you convert the coins to cash and feel proud of saving money without too much effort.?

Bank of America recognized the power of this behaviour and, in 2005, introduced the groundbreaking "Keep the Change" savings account. The product modelled the existing human behaviour of saving coins in jars. Customers could now use debit cards to purchase goods, and the account automatically rounds up the total to the nearest dollar in the savings account.

Within a remarkably short period, over 2.5 million customers amassed a staggering $500 million in savings.

?“Keep the Change” savings account was not invented by chance, nor is it a result of the lone genius inventor. It’s actually the result of applying a methodology for innovation called Design thinking.

Design thinking framework emphasises the importance of adopting a human centred approach when embarking on new product ventures. By truly understanding the functional pain points and behavioural patterns of the clients, product teams can create solutions that truly address client needs. Bank of America's teams applied this approach to financial goals and discovered the inherent inclination of individuals to save coins in a home jar. Building upon this insight, “Keep the Change”? appealed to consumers emotionally and functionally: It did the job and consumers loved it.

Data teams in enterprises can leverage lessons derived from design thinking framework to innovate and secure budget approval for their own projects.?

Below are 3 lessons to ensure a successful launch of reporting products:

Conduct interviews to understand business processes

To properly apply design thinking methodology, the data team engages in interviews with users to gather insights. Asking multiple “why” questions identifies what is the pain point of each team impacted by the problem, and evaluates its financial implications for the firm.

To illustrate this process, let’s consider a financial services firm specialising in services and technology products for asset managers. Suppose the marketing department approaches the data team to build a report showing the number of client’s sessions visiting educational platforms.?

Instead of immediately diving into report development, the data team can inquire:

“How would you use this information?”?

“What are your alternatives to get this information and why are they not good enough?”

By posing such questions, the data team discovered the events that precipitated the initial requirements for the report solution from the marketing team:

The financial services firm developed a new service that helps asset managers outsource regulatory compliance. Marketing wants to validate the value of this service, so they need comprehensive client data, which is precisely where the data team comes into play. The goal is to deliver personalised reports with various information about the clients and ultimately find correlations between sales and different client profiles as measured by: online sessions in the educational platforms, downloads from various pages, financial information etc.

Build a prototype with limited data

Design thinking methodology advice to create a prototype with only as much effort to generate useful feedback and evolve the idea.?

Data teams can apply this learning by limiting the data for the project until it is just enough to prove the business case. It saves time for the most costly activities: engineering the data and ensuring good reporting quality.

The data & marketing teams from our previous example can reduce the effort of building a report by focusing on a single client segment. For instance, they could concentrate on companies with over $1m assets under management and maximum 5 individuals in the practice.

Incorporate feedback to change the prototype until it proves the business case

Design thinking emphasises teamwork, such as co-creating with customers or colleagues. The goal is to continuously change the prototype, incorporating perspectives from different teams and help experimenters learn something new from each iteration, until the prototype establishes a solid business case.

Applying this valuable learning to our specific use case, the data and marketing teams embarked on a series of experiments to validate the regulatory compliance outsourcing service. They discovered a unique way to profile the clients: By organising events on regulatory compliance topics, the teams collected the list of event attendees and uploaded the email list to the report. The app identifies individuals working in asset management companies with a maximum 5 employees, and whose assets have grown at least 50% in the last year. The marketing team would then get in touch with the main contact from those firms, with a 30% likelihood to secure new service engagements.

Applying design thinking helped the data & marketing teams evolve from the initial requirements “build a report showing the number of sessions” to an optimised pre-sale process with clearly defined financial benefits for the firm.

Conclusion

Data teams looking to innovate can apply the following insights from design thinking method to significantly improve the chance of launching a successful reporting application:

1. Conduct interviews to understand business processes?
2. Build a prototype with limited data
3. Incorporate feedback from different teams until the prototype proves a solid business case