Be an Innovation Warrior, Not an Innovation Worrier
Here are some tips and tricks to help push some of your innovative ideas through at your workplace.
Virtual banking (VB) is one of the hottest topics in the financial services industry today, especially in Hong Kong where eight VB licenses were granted in 2019. A common line of thinking is that startups provide more fertile ground for innovation, compared to established organisations that are seen as more traditional. The latter is often perceived as having legacy design, process controls, limited resources, and the potential impact to system architecture function as blockers to innovation.
In my post today, I’d like to share how innovation can take root in established organisations too, particularly when you frame innovation as a solution to an existing problem.
How can we empower ourselves to drive innovation?
For starters, let me share a bit about what I do at DBS Bank Hong Kong. My role is to support architecture and development within the Consumer Banking domain. I help support project collaborations and application support among our system teams and business users. At DBS, when we approach new technology innovations and enhancements, our goal is to make a joyful banking experience for both our external and internal customers. We see innovation not merely from the lens of invention, but as a solution to a problem.
When we think of innovative companies, we think of the likes of Uber, Grab, Netflix and Apple. These companies exemplify disruptive innovation, offering new solutions to new customers. But there’s another type of innovation known as optimisation innovation. This is where existing innovations are improved for existing customers, a process that includes the digitisation and automation of previously manual processes — which is the focus of this post.
First off, it is essential to talk to users and discover what their pain points are. This helps us understand what the existing process is like, and what the user wants to see improved. After discussion with our fellow collaborators, we can propose how best to leverage automation and other tools to make the process more efficient. Once we’ve put together a concrete solution and timeline, and established what the tangible benefits are, we can pitch the solution to the respective champion for buy-in.
While digitising internal processes may not seem as revolutionary as creating the iPhone, they present great opportunities to demonstrate your ability to drive change and bring about tangible benefits for your colleagues.
Here are examples of some of the projects I’ve worked on for DBS Bank Hong Kong (DBS HK):
Leveraged Robotics Process Automation tools to digitise manual processes for our Consumer Banking Operations teams
- Automated processes to enable auto-retrieval of cardholder information across multiple systems; helping to save over 700 manhours per year.
- Auto-generate identity authentication checks in our call centres; helping to reduce toil for our call centre agents and reducing the time needed to generate each security question to 0.5 seconds
- In 2019, DBS HK’s RPA programme received the Certificate of Merit in the Smart Productivity category from the Hong Kong Awards for Industries
Created a mobile application for DBS HK staff to book meeting rooms and see bus schedules
- Commonly used by all DBS HK staff across business and support units
Reduced need for office space storage by digitising paper documents and adding an index for easy look-up
- Helped to optimise the use of office space by enabling teams to convert storage space into staff workspaces
- Provided easy access to scanned documents, which enabled more staff to work remotely during the Covid-19 pandemic
These internal facing optimisation innovations helped to make quantitative and qualitative differences to our internal DBS customers, giving them more autonomy to complete their daily tasks in a sustainable and cost-effective way. Following the success of these initiatives, I was able to take on larger and more high-profile innovation projects to support the bank.
Below are two examples of recent bank innovation projects I helped support: delivering an end-to-end, straight through processing (STP) journey for DBS HK customers to acquire Unsecured Loans; and the Hong Kong Monetary Authority’s (HKMA) initiative to strengthen open banking and ecosystem partnerships. While higher profile projects such as these mean more complexity in terms of the project’s scale, stakeholders, planning and performance, the framework to approaching the innovation remains the same:
- Talk to your users to discover their pain points
- Work with your collaborators to identify the most appropriate tech solution
- Seek endorsement and regular feedback from your champion to drive continuous improvement
Unsecured Loans for DBS HK customers — end-to-end and straight through processing
To ensure DBS HK’s digital platforms remain best-in-class, our teams continuously look for ways to enhance our customers’ journeys with us. That’s why, in 2020, we identified an opportunity to provide customers with straight-through-processing to acquire unsecured loans. Previously, the manual process required customers to visit our branches — something which became increasingly difficult during the Covid-19 pandemic. As such, we explored how we could improve the user experience via our digital channels to:
- Deliver a digital end-to-end journey
- Provide instant loan disbursement
- Allow more customers to enjoy STP
The design and development process involved numerous stakeholders from across the bank, including business, technology and compliance. In technology alone, to deliver the enhanced end-to-end digital journey required the support of over 10 systems teams. Through our DBS HK credit card platform, Card+, we delivered a seamless and integrated Unsecured Loan journey for customers. A key enabler for this journey was leveraging e-identity verification of the applicant’s Hong Kong ID cards. What’s more, we leveraged Hong Kong’s Fast Payment System (FPS) to enable loans to be credited to any local Hong Kong bank account instantly. In the first six months since launch, over 3,300 loan applications have been completed by existing-to-bank customers via the new platform. With this, DBS HK can continue being a force to be reckoned with in the personal loan business space.
Hong Kong Monetary Authority’s initiative to strengthen Open Banking and Ecosystem Partnerships
The HKMA launched this project as a means of allowing banks and their third-party service providers (TSPs) to have a secured, controlled and convenient operating environment to deliver new products and solutions. To support this initiative, our team worked with both internal and external stakeholders to gather requirements, perform governance, as well as build, test and roll out. By accessing our industrial strength API channels, our ecosystem partners can embed numerous features to enhance their own applications and platforms. For example, DBS Credit Card customers can now automatically redeem DBS points in mobile platforms such as KLOOK and HK Taxi. From the backend perspective, this required adding additional security measures such as a one-time password (OTP) sent via SMS.
By collaborating with our ecosystem partners to deliver innovative and integrated banking services, we create an enhanced customer experience, while also ensuring Hong Kong’s banking sector continues to be competitive. Through this initiative, DBS has formed mutually beneficial relationships with ecosystem partners and sought to embed even more digital elements into our customer journeys.
What if we need some guidance to propose one of our own innovation ideas?
At DBS Bank, we are fortunate to have programmes where staff can propose innovation projects to improve existing processes. One of group-wide programmes I participated in was “Warriors of WOW” — an initiative that encourages “leadapreneurs” to innovate at scale during a strategically-aligned journey over the span of eight months. During this programme, I successfully proposed a journey to enhance the onboarding of API partners in our Consumer Banking business.
If such programmes don’t yet exist in your company, fret not. Here are some tips to help you put together a great business case for your management team’s review:
- Maintain regular cadence with your stakeholders and understand what’s at stake — Finetune your idea and collect feedback through monthly updates to senior management, weekly squad meetings and more
- Secure your resources — You may not be able to complete all the tasks on your own, so secure the resources you need for design, development, testing, etc.
- Be data-driven — Set up your SMART goals, test and collect results, and use data to drive the initiative
- Leverage on existing tools — Automate where possible to remove toil and facilitate the workflow
If you have a few ideas percolating on how to drive innovation in your company, I hope you’ll find the tips I shared to be useful. All the best!
