insights on steroids
data, our new oil?
recently i have been participating on one of the largest innovation conferences in europe. it was like all typical events, a few great talks and a lot of very boring presentations by people who could easily afford to get on stage (supported by organisers who were not in the position to say no to their money or educate them on presenting). but i am not after lecturing conference organisers now
the most exciting part of the conference was a panel discussion with people (including myself) from different types of organisations across the world. we had a great talk on in-house/external innovation in the financial world with an opening question of do we really need banks and do they have any chance to survive? (most of the panelists were c level bankers, they really liked the starter :))
however the closing question of the panel was a classic ‘we are running out of time so pick only one element’: choose one element, one element only that is the outmost important ingredient to ensure top of the breed product/service innovation in a large organisation.
actually i do believe everyone should be thinking about this one and once she/he has an answer work on that part each and every day. at the panel we all had different opinions, one put her vote on the idea nurturing process, another one on people, one on company culture and one on partnerships. i believe all of them plays a key role, but my answer was insights (based on data), as all other might be perfect, but without insights you can’t find the problem you are to solve
let’s taste the word of scalable insights for a moment
for me very simply the only scalable insight is data. period. don’t get me wrong, i do not doubt there is place for human intuition, for user interviews, but there is no way you can massively scale it up without leveraging data, automating detecting patterns and turning them into insights.
alright. i haven’t been thinking of that, but it makes sense, so i will get it done today as this is that simple, right?
maybe not that simple. i strongly believe today’s greatest challenge around data is how to build an ecosystem with those who have and those who can use that. our team is tackling both aspects, we would sell our kidneys to get data from our partners, customers, prospects while we are also heavily practicing to be masters of the force
we still need to excel in both fields, but i am certain that #1 we are going in the right direction #2 we cannot lay back and wait for both to be perfectly set for us. //once a former boss of mine told me there is no such thing as the blue moon. honestly, it was harder to digest than realising that santa was one of our childhood neighbours
what if?
until we cracked both of our challenges we had to repeat our old mantra, fake it till you make it. after several pointless sessions we finally had a breakthrough, why don’t we build a system that can leverage insights and turn them into actions, not considering how do we get those insights. a system that simply connects the dots, have a trigger and link an automated action to that
ifttt does something very similar, define simple, automated rules for yourself. for those who don’t know you can set up rules like sending an alert if rain is likely in the next 2 hours, ordering some gifts for yourself if you completed your monthly running targets, turning specific messages into action items on your to do list, turning on the heating if you are in 10 minute distance from your home etc.
yoohoo, let’s build a system
building such a system is a routine work for our guys, we actually managed to complete the mvp in 4 weeks time. however to showcase the potential we were lacking one crucial element, something like the power supply, the insights. an educated colleague of mine shared with me the technical term to this situation is called fucked.
inspite of our obsession to data this time we had to come up with real life insights on our own. we used all the techniques we have tested earlier, brainstorming, brainwriting, group and individual interviews, expert sessions, crazy 8s and after a bunch of ‘it is nonsense, we are wasting our time’ iterations we managed to set a list of insights that could represent value to our target customers and can stand for the demonstration of the system we have just put together
as we are focusing on the financial world we grabbed items that either eliminate significant level of frustration in the banking or add never seen ahhha moments to the customer’s financial journeys.
we had a wide range of ideas covering a full whiteboard with post-its, and some of them actually made sense. there were a few simple ones that can change your experience based on your context, like
#1 increasing security level while you are abroad to more complex ones like
#2 detecting you would get better off with investments instead of deposits, or #3 proposing a pre-approved loan for those who started to save for a vehicle, #4 and automated money management for those never set up any pfm budgets for themselves. all of these can be very simply detected and the automated actions on those can significantly improve the customer experience and provide huge business opportunities for the financial institution at the same time
so what’s next?
our labs is pitching and showcasing our system with the manually created actionable insights, and it really opens even the most sleepy eyes, so most likely we will productise this base version. meanwhile we are heavily working on grabbing data and building algos to find patterns and automate the rule creation process. this will keep us busy for the next 3–6 months but the early results and feedbacks are extremely positive
what is your read on this? do you work on something similar and happy to discuss or we sound completely silly to you? reach out to us to have a chat and if you read so far we don’t resist accepting a few claps now
