Designing Financial Services for New Markets

In large businesses, design is often at the mercy of a business case cycle, where funding, timing, and project definition is all but completed before a design project can even begin. The radical idea here was to complete a preliminary round of design activities before the business case had to be made. Because a project must typically be defined and justified before it receives organisational priority and funding, this puts design projects perpetually on the defensive and prevents truly innovative design work from ever getting off the ground. This project was an experiment undertaken with senior leadership to see if a small-scale design project could, with minimal funding and time, give shape to a project that could then be set up through a proper business case process. 




This project focused on finding opportunities with potential for innovative product/service offerings in the wealth management arm of a major Australian bank. Our initial concept was to map the existing wealth management service model against the needs of a mass market customer base and potentially develop a low cost wealth management delivery model. The project was exploratory, and was limited to a six-week time-scale, with the intent of carrying out customer research, concept generation, and rapid prototyping of one or more prospective business models in a highly condensed timeframe so that opportunities could be presented back to the division’s leadership through a business case catered specifically to the criteria outlined in the preliminary project.


Customer research was used help to identify “wealth” criteria for the mass market and to explore the transformation of wealth management from a “service for the affluent” to a comprehensive financial services relationship model that applies to lower wealth individuals. The identification of customer benefits resulted in a rapid-prototyping process that yielded an ambitious new product concept. In this case, the concept was not further developed at the time, but the learnings from the project helped the wealth management division better understand the challenges for entering the mass market. 


The project began with a set of hypotheses generated by the division’s leadership in a series of strategy sessions that focused on a five-year time horizon. These hypotheses captured an aspirational space and became a roadmap for the design team’s line of inquiry. Was it feasible to capture a broader market? What would a direct model look like? What would we need to know about the mass market and any particular segmentations within it? 




A set of design principles was then compiled from the design research undertaken over two weeks in the field. These learnings were extremely important because they constituted a real paradigm shift in the way that the client offered value in the marketplace. The team went on to generate a number of potential product/service concepts, and chose one to rapidly prototype and test with customers. 


Furthermore, the project was used internally as a demonstration project, showing business people inside the organisation how design could be utilised early in the development phases of a project initiative, and in a way that could help de-risk later investment in the project. A big part of the learnings from the project involved internal participants who accompanied the design team out into the field to conduct customer research, and who later participated in concept generation and prototyping activities. Over the six weeks, this internal team went from skeptics of the design process to enthusiastic advocates.

 

Portfolio > Service Design > Investment Product Innovation

Client: Top-5 financial services company, Australia


My Role: Programme Manager, Design