The design consultancy inside a corporation: Adaptive Path

Brandon Schauer, CEO of Adaptive Path and an IIT Institute of Design alumnus invited the 20 participants to drop by for lunch at their studio on the San Francisco waterfront as part of the Strategy World Tour. Adaptive Path was in the news last year when it was acquired by Capital One — news that came as a surprise and indicator of design’s growing influence on traditional industries. We asked Brandon a few questions about his work and where he sees the future of personalization and finance.

IIT Institute of Design: How or what product innovation is most impacting the digital work you do?

Brandon Schauer: The emergence of the interface layer, “a layer of convenience between us and the underlying services and utilities that improve our lives.” This mentality turns the end-to-end customer experience into the product being created, redefining what we mean by product, data, and the front line.

As personalization becomes more important to people, how does it factor into user experience design?

In today’s world it’s possible to know more about a customer than ever before, yet still treat them like a number. Analytics and big data reveal cold insights about a faceless customer, but they can’t solve the most important question — why that customer should care about you. Redefining data to include emotions, preference, or taste can be the means of forming relationship and care to create a service worthy of a customer’s investment of time and trust. Great experience design is the medium for understanding your customer better and better, then demonstrating that you’re worthy of that knowledge.

What is emerging in finance that is most interesting to consider within other industries?

Like with hotels (Airbnb) and transportation (Uber), new entrants and business models will remake the industry’s landscape. Inherent in many of these new solutions is an inversion of the customer’s mental model of how money behaves. Money is no longer stored in an institution and accessible only when you play by their rules. Money is out there with you in the world: fluid and at your service. This inversion of financial services will be something everyone engages in as a member of society and will drive or benchmark customer expectations for how all other services should work.