Campus: What’s Next?
Innovation and Digital Product Development in Financial Services
On Thursday 25th May, Kyan launched a new quarterly event series titled ‘Campus’ ( http://campus.kyan.com/). The goal is to provide thought-provoking talks as well as candid, open discussion on a chosen topic. Campus events are thematic, with each based around a topic that we feel encapsulates an impactful trend in a particular industry or sector.
Our inaugural campus looked at Financial Services and what we view as a major shift in how digital products are being conceptualised, built and developed. We’ve shifted away from front-loaded strategies that put huge amounts of work and investment into projects before they’re ever actually released to users. Instead, we’ve shifted to a culture of rapid, cheap prototyping that allows product teams to identify potential failures, additional features or improvements as early as possible and with minimal investment.
We had three speakers, each of whom addressed this trend from a different angle. Laurent Maguire from Kyan discussed this trend from the perspective of what this means for anyone actually building digital products. Rob Belgrave from Wirehive discussed the state of digital infrastructure in 2017 and what’s required to deliver the best possible experiences. Finally, Thomas George from Monzo provided the story behind one of the biggest UK digital product successes of the past few years.
Goodbye Software, Hello Product
Laurent Maguire, CEO, Kyan
In line with our theme, Laurent focused on the challenges facing larger organisations in delivering innovation strategies that keep pace with smaller, more nimble businesses.
Laurent focused on the dual pressures (and opportunities) of emerging technology and ever-increasing customer expectations.
With the major tech giants (Google, Facebook, Apple etc) now ensuring that everyone is aware of what excellent user experiences feel like, users expect this same quality across all of their digital interactions.
Similarly, hyper-growth challengers are utilising technology to create entirely new solutions to old problems across all sectors. Uber has created a new kind of urban mobility, whilst Airbnb has built a new method for finding and booking accommodation. Customers have come to expect this same level of ingenuity in problem-solving from traditional providers. They don’t expect to have to connect the dots when they’re well-aware their provider could (and should!) be doing it for them.
Laurent discussed a frequent objection from established financial service providers is often that as a ‘non-technology company’, it is difficult to compete with businesses founded with a tech-focused solution in mind from the outset. Laurent’s riposte is simply that in 2017 — every company needs to become a technology company.
Fintech startups have found success in ‘unbundling’ individual financial services by identifying (and removing) friction points within an existing customer experience. By aspiring to deliver this one service better than traditional providers, they can compete on a more level playing field.
Laurent argued that larger organisations would also benefit from adopting this mindset of identifying and attempting to solve individual points of friction as opposed to looking to immediately implement an enterprise-wide transformation.
Laurent later discussed what the workflow would look like, utilising the kind of rapid, iterative prototyping model that we centred this event around.
This model turns user feedback from simply a decider of whether a product ultimately succeeds or not, and instead, actually embeds it into the development cycle. The production of a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) is central to this strategy, ensuring that consequent product development is based on user expectations, feedback and needs.
Investment only progressively scales up as you become more comfortable that you are closing on a concept and product that you can demonstrate resonates with users. Failures are reversed from being potentially costly embarrassments to events you actually welcome as they provide cheaply acquired, useful feedback to factor into the next iteration.
Earlier in the talk, Laurent referred to Google’s model of 10% vs 10x thinking when it comes to innovation, and it’s easy to see how the agile framework outlined in this talk could frame either incremental or full-on, disruptive approaches to innovation.
Digital Infrastructure in 2017
Rob Belgrave, CEO, Wirehive
Wirehive CEO, Rob Belgrave discussed the state of hosting and digital infrastructure, and what’s required ‘behind the scenes’ to underpin the kinds of products and digital experiences we discussed building in the first talk.
In telling this story, Rob started at the beginning — a map of the undersea cables required to underpin our global connectivity.
As a non-technical audience member, I found this a great way to introduce some of the concepts Rob later came onto. A key message from Rob was that even seemingly ethereal concepts that are easy to take for granted like ‘the internet’ are always grounded in the tangible.
With the growth of ‘Cloud’ hosting, this was a major concept that Rob underlined is often discussed as though it’s something that simply happens, without a clear understanding of how or the nuances that impact performance.
Rooted in the tangible, Rob took us through a Cloud 101 masterclass, breaking down the implications of shared, vs dedicated hosting, public vs private cloud, the various cloud models and the key advantages of cloud.
Rob then moved on to the hyper-scale cloud providers, detailing the positioning and major strengths of each.
Rob went on to discuss the performance benefits of Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), security considerations and architecture setup. Finally, Rob discussed the growth of DevOps as a culture and mindset, and why this close collaboration between developers and IT professionals is flourishing.
Using the exponential growth of Netflix as an example of the incredible opportunity cloud technology offers, Rob’s final message was one of potential adoption strategy.
The Monzo Story
Thomas George, Head of Risk, Monzo
Thomas George discussed the Monzo story and how a startup, mobile-only bank is able to stay agile in such a heavily regulated industry. With our theme for the day being about product development in financial services, Monzo provided a fantastic example of the growing importance of ease of use, accessibility and delightful experience in product development.
Thomas set the scene early in terms of the regulatory hurdles in Financial services. Exploring the lifespan of Monzo as a business, it’s interesting just how much of that time has been spent getting to the point where receiving a banking license was actually possible.
It also underlines another of Thomas’ points in terms of how early in its potential development Monzo really is. With the learnings and growing customer base that it has, Thomas discussed how Monzo is now exploring a number of different product developments. Thomas was keen to highlight how Monzo wants to provide alternative solutions and fresh thinking wherever possible in terms of how a current account provider can benefit the account holder.
In discussing the challenges that Monzo has faced, it was interesting to hear more about the balancing act between ‘startup’ and ‘bank’ and the challenges of each.
Startup:
- No connections to payment networks
- No control over the user experience
- Someone else’s Risk Appetite
Bank:
- Governance reduces agility
- Compliance reduced to tick box exercise
- Risk averse: No moonshots
Another interesting point for me was Thomas discussing the values that customers and the press cite as Monzo being known for (technology and customer support) versus the additional priorities it perceives internally.
This resonated with me in line with Rob’s talk in terms of the fluffier outward-facing values being backed up with crucial infrastructure behind the scenes.
Bringing the talk back round to Product — Thomas discussed the iterative development process of the Monzo product and how it’s very much been a case of using the team’s observations, customer experience and feedback to refine and add new functionality rather than having to radically overhaul the product.
With one of the key focuses for the evening being how even larger organisations can adopt startup-like practices to fuel their own innovation strategies, there were some key takeaways in terms of looking at Monzo’s key values.
- Focus on Customers relentlessly
- Take everything back to First Principles
- Structure a team around your objectives not the expectations of others
- Execute iteratively and rapidly
Campus Takeaways
I found it interesting that Thomas chose to use the famous duck metaphor (looks effortless above the surface, paddling like mad underneath) to describe how Monzo tries to keep everything as simple as possible for its development staff.
To me, this actually seemed like an interesting metaphor to span the three talks at Campus. The analogy works just as well for digital products themselves. Effortless and seamless experience on the top level (be it an interface / platform / app), with the heavy lifting and infrastructure hidden behind the scenes.
The challenge for entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs and product teams more generally is being able to identify the points at which you can do the paddling for customers (often referred to as the points of ‘friction’) and allow them to effortlessly glide along to their destination.
If you’d like to receive an invitation to our next Campus event, please register via the dedicated event site here.
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com on May 30, 2017.
