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“Empathizing with someone takes them off a fictional pedestal and replaces it with a solid foundation built on trust, respect and recognition,” explained Leslie Witt, who leads IDEO Bay Area’s Financial Services domain, a group deeply committed to re-imagining the products, services, systems and institutions that shape people’s financial lives and behaviors. In an interview tied to the second annual MasterCard Foundation Symposium on Financial Inclusion, we discussed the evolution of IDEO’s work as it relates to financial services, what it means to put clients at the center, key lessons and insights she’s learned over the years and much more.
IDEO (pronounced “eye-dee-oh”) is an award-winning global design firm that takes a human-centered, design-based approach to helping organizations in the public and private sectors innovate and grow.
Tell me a little bit about the origins of the financial services work at IDEO and what inspired you to want to lead this practice.
IDEO is a global design and innovation company that from its origins – over three decades ago and as a product design firm –embraces a process that puts users at the center of inspiration and exploration: ‘human-centered design’, or, ‘design thinking’ as it is often called.
Over time, IDEO’s design focus expanded - from physical products to digital interactions, from digital interactions to in-person experiences, from in-person experiences to the design of brands, organizations, systems - while our focus on the user persisted. We are increasingly asked to bring the powers of human-centered design to an ever-broadening landscape of complex challenges.
Which is where our financial service work comes in. We wield insight on human behavior to shift institutional norms and drive better long-term outcomes. We develop empathy in order to develop solutions with relevance and nuance. We deploy the nimble agility of prototyping to ‘build’ our way to compelling, scalable solutions – navigating tough regulatory and legacy technology landscapes with relative ease.
The effort that put IDEO on the map in Financial Services – showcasing, in a very simple way, the capacity of design thinking to fuel great solutions for customers and business –was a collaboration, almost a decade ago, with Bank of America. The outcome from that effort – Keep the Change, a hybrid spending and savings product – harnessed a money behavior that comes naturally to all, spending, to painlessly build a reserve. It got users on the first rung of the savings ladder – something many struggled to do independently. It was a strong market success for BofA – helping them acquire millions of new customers and retain them over the long-term - and still gets referenced for its heuristic elegance. Since then, and in partnership with institutions like BBVA, Wells Fargo, GE Money Bank and State Farm, as well as with a wide range of public services, retailers, MNOs and beyond, we’ve been helping to define excellence in the realm of designing for money.
I joined IDEO almost ten years ago as an architect. Several years into my tenure – following a wide range of retail, hospitality and brand experience design efforts - I was nudged onto a financial service challenge, working with a major global institution in Japan. And, I say ‘nudged’, because I really didn’t want to do it – no interest in the sector, or so I thought. I was wooed in by promises of retail outcomes and extravagant Tokyo travel.
Much to my surprise, I fell in love.
The design challenge, in reality, couldn’t have been further afield from architecture – financial product re-design compelled, institutionally, by a radical overhaul of credit regulation, the Japanese Diet wiping out, in one fell swoop, what was then a booming sub-prime market. Serendipitous luck, I firmly believe, that my first exposure to the world of designing for money was in Japan and collided smack dab with regulation. Cultural norms and attitudes about money were so obviously different from the US. Product structure and exchange mechanisms so divergent, as well, that I was left with no choice but to see the entire system for the constructed fabrication that it is and as a result, as an enormous design opportunity.
Over the ensuing years – leading a broad range of programs that focused on improving the money lives of the un- and under-banked, the middle class, small businesses, students, retirees…and working within zones like payments, borrowing, savings, investing, insurance and beyond – I put a stake in the ground around this area as my primary passion and focus. I’ve been leading IDEO Bay Area’s work in the financial sector for the last three years.
When we talk about putting clients at the center of financial inclusion, what does that mean to you in practice?
‘Putting clients at the center’, especially in the realm of financial inclusion, means two primary things to me –
It’s a practice, not a philosophy. Putting clients at the center doesn’t ‘just’ mean talking more about your clients. It doesn’t ‘just’ mean going out into the field and spending time getting to know them. It means action - shifting the very way you engage them – from service model to space, from product design to policy, from how you message and acquire to how you sustain and support. It means demanding new internal habits and developing new norms - allowing human needs to live ‘within’ your organization at the same level of strategic priority as operational constraints and discussions of ROI.
Empathy is the enemy of idealism. Understanding your clients – their needs, wants, motivations – requires engagement with their messy, emotional, very human selves. Especially in the realm of serving the world’s poor, big-hearted purpose-driven people can often be blinded by their good intentions, so much so that they don’t honor the very real life situations and choices that create behavior. Empathizing with someone takes them off a fictional pedestal and replaces it with a solid foundation built on trust, respect and recognition.
What are some of the key lessons you've learned about design through your various engagements with major financial services companies?
Institutional lessons:
Embrace the regulators: Regulation is the whipping boy of ‘why not’ when it comes to innovation in the financial sphere. It forms an easy institutional excuse that’s deployed often - with comfort and lack of specificity. Rather than compliance providing an ambiguous and universal ‘out’ for the org, embrace legal as part of your ideation and design process. You’ll be surprised at how often inclusion and a creation-orientation shifts that flag from red to green.
Stop blaming your back-end system: Another favorite impediment to innovation is legacy technology. Just like regulation, it’s not that we don’t acknowledge the very real boundaries and limitations these systemic constraints provide. But while design loves constraints, organizations often transmute them into mythic barriers, forming what for all intents is an insurmountable impasse. Customer-centered innovation can influence technology and offer from both sides, quickly realizing what is possible to Frankenstein as a compelling front-end experience while using desirability as the primary mechanism to triage more expensive back-end system improvements.
Culture matters most: Which is to say – you can’t fake it. The organization’s culture will project onto customers – through service interactions, through policy, through messaging and offer. Becoming human-centered has profound – positive – impact on employee experience and that attention to purpose translates directly into the experience of your customers.
Design for behaviors, not demographics: We identify attitudes and behaviors that cut across income, gender and generational divides. These are ‘designable’ dimensions of your customers that help in shaping compelling services reflecting back their values, preferences and priorities. In the landscape of financial inclusion, the quest for equitability often demands a demographers’ lens. Analyzing outcome in conjunction with demography is important, but designing engagement with behavior in mind is equally so.
User lessons:
To exchange is human: Which is one of the reasons payments should be a primary means for customer engagement. Forcing traditional product divisions – say, sequestering saving and insurance from the core mechanism of exchange – makes these valuable monetary mechanisms less relevant to people’s natural, unavoidable and everyday intersection with money.
People are horrible calculators: Which is why my message to banks and other money service providers is - ‘do the math for them’. Budgeting and planning failures often come out of lack of insight on the impact of time or repetition – percentage rates and compounding mostly serve to increase the inscrutability. Help people see the additive value of their actions and you’ll help them stay on track towards higher level goals.
Life is a lot like Seattle - ‘rainy days’ are in the forecast: There’s a ‘once-and-done’ quality to much financial advice. Most advice messages the construction of safety nets – things like ‘rainy day’ savings accounts – but treats them as impenetrable stashes. In reality - and ever more so as you move down the income rungs – unforeseen and costly circumstances arise with frequency. Framing ‘use’ as a norm rather than an anomaly makes it more probable that the practice of accumulation becomes habit.
How might these insights and ideas be applied in the context of the developing world?
Understanding, designing for and sympathizing with cultural nuances and the very real impact of product structure on the lives of the world’s poor is fundamental. But you can do so whilst standing on the shoulders of lessons learned elsewhere.
What were some of the big takeaways for you from the Symposium?
Customer-centricity is an easily shared goal, but bridging the desire gap and shifting to meaningful change is hard.
Leadership commitment is essential in moving the needle towards the customer. Customer-centeredness fundamentally needs the engagement of front-line employees, but ‘bottoms up’ alone will struggle to create the shifts in culture, process and offer necessary to build and sustain a truly human-centered organization.
