Financial Experience Design 2018

Kick off your FXD experience by joining a diverse, brilliant group of thinkers and leaders from across the financial services ecosystem for an intimate and inspiring pre-conference leadership forum. Participants will share and discuss varying perspectives and opinions on current trends and issues designing for financial wellbeing and improving customer experience. By coming together in structured dialog, we can create opportunities to learn from each other and help us lead our organizations to deliver better experiences. The forum is included in your conference registration.

Topics covered will include:

Role of Financial Companies in Designing for Financial Wellbeing. Behavioral economics and designing for behavior change in people’s financial lives has become a consideration for many companies to explore. But designing for behavior change is challenging and has long-term outcome goals that may not be aligned with short-term incentives. Issues of trust and ethics also come into play. With these complex factors in mind, this discussion will explore the strategic options for financial companies to consider related to financial wellbeing.
Facilitator: Dr. Amy Bucher, Behavior Change Design Director, Mad*Pow

Customer-Centered Design and Innovation in Financial Companies. There is increasing acknowledgement and movement toward human-centered design and design thinking for innovation and product development. However, evolving and transforming toward these processes in well-established and highly regulated financial services companies is a challenge. Companies have explored Innovation Centers, re-organizing around products, aligning with functional domains, and expanding design thinking through training. Attendees will share their experiences as we collectively look at how can companies can evolve to get the most impact from their design transformation efforts.
Facilitator: Adam Connor, VP Transformational Design Mad*Pow

Managing Multiple Customer Touchpoints, Channels, and Technologies. New technologies, device types, and evolving customer expectations place a large burden on design of financial offerings. New technologies can be disruptive, but they can also be disrupting, especially if companies don’t have a strategy on how to deal with the evolving landscape. Virtual reality experiences? An app for iWatch? We will discuss approaches that companies can take to manage the ever evolving technology landscape and shifting customer expectations.
Facilitator: Jonathan Podolsky, VP Experience Strategy, Mad*Pow

Designing to Build trust and Deliver Delight
Abstract: Designing for Trust and Impact is very important at Aspiration. Everyday we work to answer the questions how might we turn fear into delight? How might we build trust? These are some of the main challenges we constantly face in our work.

Robert Glazer’s company, Acceleration Partners, has won numerous awards for their workplace culture and employee happiness, most recently #4 on Glassdoor’s Employees’ Choice Awards, Ad Age’s Best Place to Work, Entrepreneur’s Top Company Culture, Inc. Magazine’s Best Place to Work and many more.  Glazer attributes this success to the introduction of Company Core Values and a rigorous hiring process.  Once employees are hired, care is taken to nurture staff both professionally and personally, while continuously evaluating their fit as the company grows.  This 360⁰ approach has led employees to proclaim “I don’t know why I’d ever leave.”  Glazer will share the evolution of these practices and his nontraditional approaches such as the Capacity/Experience Paradox, Mindful Transitions, and the Work-Life Paradigm.

MEET COALESCE
Coalesce is an AI software application that automates tedious, mundane workflows for financial services firms. Coalesce is easily deployable and learns directly from business users without any programming so that employees can focus on higher level tasks.

Other AI companies offer a point solution to a specific workflow. Instead, Coalesce takes a generalized approach to optimize a multitude of workflows using AI and machine learning suited to your business needs.

Can we design financial services and products that are good for business and good for people? This panel will discuss Financial Wellbeing - How do we define it? How do we measure it? How do we design products to achieve it? We'll explore how companies might find ways to build products and services that help drive financial health while also drive business results.

Can you design an innovation to improve the health insurance open enrollment experience so that it protects the financially vulnerable from hardship?

Commonwealth has partnered with the Mad*Pow powered CHXD to launch an innovation challenge to prompt the financial, healthcare, and design community to envision a solution that will help employees with incomes under $55,000 balance their health and financial needs at open enrollment.

Learn more about the Center for Health Experience Design and the Design Challenge here.

Congratulations design leaders! With the popularity of Design Thinking, Design Sprints, Human-Centered Design, etc., and the business impact design has created for companies like Apple, Intuit, Ford, Nike, Whirlpool, and Domino’s, Design has earned its seat at the table. We made it!

But with great success, comes greater expectations. As design leaders have taken their seats, built organizations to support them, and incorporated design into organizational ways of working, business leaders continue to struggle with understanding the value design brings to everyday processes, funding decisions, resource allocation, and overall business viability. At this table, design leaders are often outmatched by their counterparts in articulating the value of design while design work is going on. Without being able to clearly articulate that value, design leaders run the risk of being pushed back into service line or peripheral entities.

In this talk, Ryan will review his approaches to connect design success to business success, to use design skills to develop business potential, and to justify design keeping a seat at the table.

AI and Data Science is already transforming how we interact with financial services companies. Chatbots, robo-advisors and other tech-based advances can provide benefits, but what's the role of the human being in service and product design? This talk will explore how and why we need to continue to blend technology and human talents to deliver breakthrough experiences.

When Facebook launched its News Feed feature in 2006, they thought it would bring people closer together. What they found was the algorithms designed to show people what they wanted worked a little too well, creating information bubbles rarely pierced by opposing viewpoints and unintentionally creating polarized sub-communities.
 
Every time we design a product to change people’s financial behaviors, we have the potential to create another version of the Facebook “News Feed”; a product with good intentions that fails to account for bad actors, worst case scenarios, and with flaws in the underlying design that could produce unintended results. When we design for behavior change, we must wrestle with ethical dilemmas ranging from the obvious to the subtle. On this panel, we explore what we can do in our roles as behavior change experts and designer leaders to create products that don’t produce unintended results because of inherent biases.

Designing for Women Isn’t “Pinkwashing”
When Ellevest set out to create a financial services company geared toward women — in an industry dominated by older white men — they knew they had to start the design process from scratch. This session will discuss why Ellevest spent thousands of hours researching how women really make money decisions — and how their findings destroyed a lot of stereotypes. The result? Anything but Lady Doritos.

Dollars and (Non)Sense
Why do your clients think about money and make the irrational financial decisions that they do? How can behavioral economics help you reframe their choices for better outcomes?
 
Jeff Kreisler – Editor-in-Chief of PeopleScience.com and award-winning co-author of "Dollars and Sense” – shares the practical and entertaining insights of behavioral science to help create better financial decision-making structures for the irrational and illogical among us. 
 
In his talk and Q&A, Jeff exposes and explores the hidden forces that secretly drive choices about money. He explains why irrational behavior often interferes with best intentions when it comes to managing finances, saving and investing.
 
Why don’t we value our future comfort and security as much as our present pleasure and spending?  Why does paying for things often feel like it causes physical pain? Why do complex financial options cause us to make irrational financial choices? We’ll explore these questions and more as we get to the heart of our financial decision making process.
 
Fascinating, engaging, funny, and essential, Dollars and Sense is a sound investment, providing the practical tools we need to help ourselves and our clients’ understand and improve financial choices, save and spend smarter, and ultimately live better.

Understanding your customers' wants and needs is one thing, but actually delivering excellent customer experiences at scale is truly complex. USAA is no stranger to this challenge, in fact, they consistently receive among the highest customer service and member loyalty ratings in the industry. In this Fireside Chat, Pamela Barclay, AVP (…), will share her experience navigating the competing demands that exist in large, established enterprises, like USAA. She will discuss how her team effectively roadmaps initiatives that serve both diverse member needs, as well as, the interdependencies of a multi-product line business. Beyond, vision setting, Pamela will also share what she's learned about how to implement these priorities through productive stakeholder alignment and the effective use of Agile. Join us for the conversation!

The Pines of Research: Designing, Equipping, and Maintaining User Research & Facilitation Labs

Abstract: Rigorous design research methodologies are key in driving value through our customer experience programs. Blending the unique experience of standing up your first user research lab with the famous tone poem by Ottorino Respighi "The Pines of Rome", this session will provide key considerations in planning and execution of bringing a lab space to your team...oh, and some instrumental inspiration as well.

Design is not just a department! Scaling the Design & Innovation Practice in Transformational Organizations
Transformation is the new black! Business, digital, agile, etc. Many large, traditional enterprises are jumping on the transformation bandwagon to amplify their innovation capability and improve business outcomes. One of the things that can get overlooked is the organizational design of the design and research functions. Designing how these teams are built, where they sit and how they serve the business are critical in ensuring transformation delivers the desired business outcomes. This is particularly acute in agile-based organizations that may be primarily focused on improving delivery. As transformation leaders we can no longer treat design and research as departments – they are capabilities that support an organization in differentiating itself from the competition. This talk will focus on ways in which organizations can be more mindful in their structure to enable true and lasting transformation.