 so excited to be back and what a wonderful time of year this is this is the regeneration of the world happens now isn't it the first day of spring I think tomorrow is the vernal equinox and it's the celebration of holy which is a wonderful wonderful kind of time of year so what I was here last year was actually heading up design at Walmart and this was my Walmart design team and what I love about connecting with the design spirit and soul of this crew is that when you actually give them the permission to do bold things you see a new side of the design team and so we're here now at a new capacity at a 324 year old Victorian era British Bank which of course is the place you go to do design right and we're gonna be setting up kind of a new design team here as well so I'm so excited to be with you guys I'm as a designer my whole goal and focus is to bring moments of joy and impact in the people's lives and so you can imagine after a career of working at Microsoft on the original surface does anyone remember by the way when surface before the tablet was a big-ass table you guys remember this like era yeah so such an interesting project around how to connect human beings to technology without keyboards and mice and a new way so you know doing a lot of that work I at Google I worked on this thing called project aura which is a modular phone I'll talk a little bit more about what that was about and why I think that's important to banking so you can imagine having done all of that and for the last 10 years I've been in the Silicon Valley my last project was actually doing a redesign of Walmart.com which I talked a little bit about last year at Jalindia you know it's been a little bit challenging for me now to say that I am a banker because somehow being a designer and being a banker this just it doesn't feel like those two things go together and but I wanted to talk to you today about why I think it's so extraordinary to bring together the left brain and the right brain you know creativity and humanity with finance and if you guys in banking or financial services the audience help you guys cool so I am now at Lloyd's banking group which I don't know if many of you know about Lloyd's banking group is not in large global bank they're actually only focused on the UK and their mission is to help Britain prosper and it was interesting when I first learned about this mission being a designer Silicon Valley you know I my bullshit leader started to go off a little bit you know like is do you really mean that mission or isn't banking just about helping make wealthy bankers more wealthy and you kind of really screw people isn't that really financial services is what what it's about and as I dug deeper I learned that this is a really deep refelt mission at Lloyd's banking group and then the founding of Lloyd's banking group has a lot to do with giving access to finances in society is actually one of the first institutions that gave savings accounts to everyday people in an era when you had to have like a 10 pound note to open up a savings account as a wealthy individual they allowed pence accounts so that ordinary people can actually get access to financial services a couple of quick examples of it we just a couple of months ago did a workshop with some of the non-profits and small organizations that work with Lloyd's to help them on their journey of understanding digital skills we partnered with Google Digital Academy and we really want them to be able to dispose more of their time on their mission less around managing the logistics of their business we care a lot about making finances to everybody in the UK and what's so interesting about that focus on the UK is that we actually go deep into vulnerable communities you know one of those communities is individuals who are facing critical illness and actually partnered with McMillan which is a non-profit that helps individuals on their journey dealing with cancer you know I heard this stat from the team that's working with these guys that in their lifetime in the UK 50% of everyone in the UK will face a cancer diagnosis at some point in time it's kind of a shocking and striking statistic to learn about and often as bankers we think about people's numbers and finances and accounts but when you face a critical illness right after you deal with the medical possibilities the next questions are can I afford this is this going to destroy my finances and so we've actually done a lot to work with our pay with our customers who become patients on average our patients people who are recognized as going through critical illness they have a really special treatment within Lloyd's we're able to actually postpone mortgage payments we kind of you know can waive fees our customers save on average 95 pounds a month actually when they're identified and they work with us in fact one of our customers Tracy really wanted people to know about this because people don't talk about critical illness and they don't talk about cancer and Tracy actually passed away a few months ago she wanted her story to be told so that other people they say cancer can actually kind of so I so my bullshit meeting was still there but it eases off a little bit and I realized here's an institution that does have a genuine desire to focus on this word prosperity and you know this word prosperity is a little interesting first of all when you ask people what does prosperity mean to them they say well I never use that word that's a weird word to use like I was just like you know talk about it in everyday language but when I do use the word prosperity I think about it in more human terms and so as a designer we came together we have there's about 500 of us at Lloyd's banking group across all different fields of design design research design strategy service design systems thinking and we started to imagine what is our purpose within that organization what does prosperity really mean to us and we said very simply we designed for that we design for prosperity the human side of that not the kind of like material acquisition side of what prosperity is but the human side and in fact this is we get some work in our studio about asking you what prosperity means and they said it's me it's my loved ones and it's a fence in my life and so this is actually using Lego and play dough some and we were kind of having people map out their lives and that's really what prosperity is all about in fact we've defined truck prosperity as helping people end the day just a bit better than a starting and that's really interesting because often we work in places where there's lots of innovation and high concepts and we have these really you know interesting visions but they feel so vague or disconnected from our lives so we wanted to have this definition to help ground us in what it can mean on a daily basis like what actions can I take today to live a life that feels more fulfilled and my financial health can go can go up just a bit now I have a confession to make in addition to being a designer in banking where I feel kind of not actually in you know always in the right environment I grew up actually without any money and there's kind of my dad was a designer my mom was an actress I was really into Star Wars when I was a kid that had just come out and we couldn't afford even buying like little Star Wars figurines so my parents gave me like garbage bags and that middle picture is me trying to become a stormtrooper and I just remember you know just feeling like I think I remember my parents fighting about money more than I remember that teach me about it and there's no public education around finances at least not in the US or in the UK I'm not sure about and we live in a society that lured us the acquisition of material objects and so when you bring together the taboo miss of nature the tattoo taboo nature of money a society that glorifies physical things you really end up with the situation that I think is best summarized by this Google search check this out so autocomplete is a pretty brilliant data analytics snapshot in culture so when you're typing finances are Google's trying to like quickly shortcut you to the top terms related to finances and so this is a data acumen snapshot of the most popular search items right around this topic so for those in the back that can't read this this is finances are ruining my marriage that's number one finances are stressing me out number three a mess are tight out of control so in some ways I feel like this is the perfect place to be a designer because we are so disconnected from our money that this this is a wonderful place to be and actually I looked at some of the statistics in the UK and this is pretty shocking but in line with that disconnection at any given time in the UK 40% of adults are dealing with financial worries and stress we lose a hundred and twenty billion pounds a year in the UK because of that the lost productivity we're relating from that stress and financial worries are significant it's number one cited cause of divorce and a significant contributor to suicide so to me I just got back from South by Southwest actually in Austin and it just feels like this is the conversation that's happening in tech around finances and like how can we have a conversation around FinTech when ordinary people just cannot make sense of finances so to me what I'm going to talk to you about today if you saw the title of this talk FinTech or something it was a little bit of you know I'm not actually talking at all about blockchain or distributed ledgers or anything related to find the FinTech what I'm talking about is how to break humanity and I'm going to talk about just really three things very simply the first one is about designing with people the second one is we have to create a new language and the third one is how to tell a really good story with a really good metaphor and all of the things I'm sharing with you today are in flight it's a little bit I'm a little bit vulnerable here because these are not like finished projects that have all been successful and in some ways I feel like this is the making of like we have a team that's in the background working on this as we speak and so but let's start let's get into it so number one designing with people who is here last year of my time you guys remember we had some Play-Doh so the whole Play-Doh piece was how do we get ordinary people to create with us and give them design tools so I'm not going to do another round of Play-Doh this year I think we did enough toothbrushes last year but I just want for those that are maybe new to this my hero is Liz Sanders Dr. Liz Sanders has really inspired the industry to think more about how do you bring people who you're designing for into the process and the whole philosophy here is that there's no such thing as experience design you can't design it for you can't design experiences for people it's in them and if you want to understand people you have to understand that experiencing is this moment in time at the intersection of our memories from the past and our dreams for the future and that's a really sacred moment that sometimes we don't even understand very deeply we have to like tweets and insta and Facebook stuff and I even I don't how many of you guys use Facebook everyone who's over the age of 40 just raised their hands there's this feature that shows you five years ago there was this memory that happened I don't know about you but like when I see those things I have totally new appreciations for those moments right so if we're if those moments are so hard to understand as designers and as engineers and as leaders we have to be in humble deference to design for those experiences and if you want to understand them there's only three ways Liz says to do that you can listen to what people say you can see what people do and you can experience what they make and what people say is what you know most market research that you're all familiar with interviews surveys one-on-ones focus groups all of that what people do is kind of this really exciting domain of applying social science and psychology and anthropology into the world of software design where you actually look at behavior and then this third one is really interesting to me it's like what what do people create when we give them the tools to make now I won't go deep into this this isn't a lecture it is definitely post lunch coma time but the whole the whole idea here is you want to get to people's deep knowledge it's called latent or tacit knowledge this is the stuff that's really important to us but hard to talk about you can't get to that stuff with just basic interviews to hear what people say if you want to get to what people know think but know feel and dream you have to get them involved in making so I gave an example last year but I'll just share this one really quickly here's an example kind of what that looks like so when we were at Google creating this module on the phone the question was what would people create if you gave them the tools to make and if you some of you may remember we created this belt grow van covered with 4,000 linear feet of belt grow because you could you know it's like modular hardware you can stick stuff to it and then change the design 3d printers hackable phones laser cutters basically a portable version of Arduino and Radio Shack and we tried to bring this to makers to see how do they want to create what do they want to create and we drove 14,000 miles across six months and created these experiences and we had a body suit also which was great by the way you have to prototype but of course one of the things about agile is this continuous improvement in learning so one of the things we didn't do on this project we didn't drive at night before we went on the road and if you may remember this our first road trip at night we realized you actually attract a lot of insects driving a belt row vehicle in the middle of the night so prototype prototype prototype so we would we would take this this roving maker mobile and we would ask people what do you want to create and within a very short period of time they would form teams two days 48 hour hackathon and I remember this this one team this guy had gotten hit from behind as a bicyclist because the bicyclist behind him at night wasn't paying attention and didn't see that he was stopping so this guy created a helmet that has accelerometers and it has red brake lights when he starts to slow down and so this was something that he actually ended up raising almost a million dollars in Kickstarter to support and I just went into the Apple store a few months ago and this is actually one of this is the second generation album was helmet so it's so exciting to see what happens with the ordinary people that's rules to create or even extraordinary people in this space so at Lloyd's we're doing this in our studios we've built customer labs research centers and all of our all the science studios and we use these as spaces of exploration play we have prototypes of course we also have kind of Lego and Play-Doh and we have people describe their lives and the relationships and one of the things we started to do is actually we brought in some game designers and we had them do this activity around thinking about instead of finances well what about actually thinking about people what they care about so that's what I mean by designing people I encourage all of you about what industry you're in is to put people into the heart of your process because really exciting things will come out for us one of the exciting things coming out is create a new design language how many of you guys are engineers I'll get engineers do this really well you have this thing called a technical architecture there's many different flavors of that right and you have actually code languages which has structured reusable components and syntax that helps hold together a whole engineering effort design has to be like that as well to be successful so we've actually started to create a new design language and in finance we thought at first that these are the things that would be most important like access to financial services from an inclusion perspective or you know your financial well-being like how how much how many assets you have now and you know what your current financial state or literacy the second one around capability it turns out these things aren't actually that important to the goal of helping you end the day better than it started from prosperity for example we did a study where we gave people basic financial literacy and then track their financial health and had a point zero one percent impact on their financial health and so I'm going to show with you today a hypothesis but a pretty good working hypothesis it's actually Philip Joe's team the member of the design team will be doing a workshop later on I don't think he'll be talking about this stuff but you can reach out to him afterwards these are the things that we're starting to talk about that actually help people make forward movement and I'll go into each of these are kind of hard to read on this but before I do I thought I would have the design leader on Phillips team that's leading the design language just tell you a bit about her personal story because to us that was the breakthrough that led us discover this my name is Lily Dart I am the design language delivery lead in the design team and this is my story before I joined Lloyd's I had a really difficult two or three years I had a relationship that went very wrong my partner was actually having a breakdown self and ended up developing a drug habit my finances felt insecure my relationships were insecure and then on top of that work became a horrible place to be as well one day I walked into work and I disassociated if you've not come across disassociation before it's like you're still connected to your body but it's really far away so you don't really feel what's happening you can't really connect with people in the same way it's almost like you're in this bubble that's sort of adjacent to what your body's actually doing I was frightened by it and I went home that day and ended up getting signed off work and put on medication although I had amazing friends and I had amazing family the anxiety and depression wouldn't let me tell them what was going on it's this horrible vicious cycle where you need help and you need help more than you have done at any other point in your life but your brain keeps on telling you that it will lose respect for you that people will see you as the piece of trash that you are if you express that these things are going through your mind so it was someone at work who had experienced similar problems before who managed to call me on what was going on and helped me notice when I was experiencing particularly bad days by being able to talk to him about it and being able to talk to my therapist about it eventually I managed to open up to everyone else in my life who have since been absolutely amazing we're not always ready and most of us aren't for quite a long time ready to go right okay I need therapy now often what we need to do is talk to other people and put into context our feelings and when we start to play our emotions back to other people often we start to see truths that we can't see on our own but if you don't have that conversation about these things are going on and this is the way that I feel you will keep on underplaying the seriousness of what you are experiencing experience and now that she's actually in charge of leading this fundamental design language around helping people connect with their finances we started to think actually more deeply about what it what what do we have to do to become more human and so here are the four things that are starting to emerge beyond just the basics of just understanding the numbers of your finances so the first one is actually around having a goal orientation you guys may have heard about this famous Harvard study where graduates were kind of asked about their goals did they write them down and what they were and it turns out and attract those folks there was one cohort that didn't really write down their goals and was one that did and it turns out that when we're actually really specific about our goals we write them down we're actually much more likely to achieve them or at least to be conscious about the process and so when it comes to financial health this is this turns out to be something that's pretty important right if you ask someone do you want to be financially healthy they'll say yes and then if you'll say to them what is the next step you need to take to do that I have no freaking idea right so trying to make that concrete is key the second one is about conscientiousness and all these are on a spectrum so what what we mean by this is how many of you guys saw the marshmallow challenge you ever see this where kids were given a marshmallow and they were like said they were said they were told if you wait for a couple of minutes I'll come back and I'll bring you two marshmallows or you can eat it now and they tracked the kids that just gobbled it up right away and the ones that you know showed restraint and it turns out on the one hand it's impulsive behavior right it's like what are you talking about there's a marshmallow in front of me I'm just gonna eat it right that's impulsivity for someone who can kind of hold off that raw impulse and actually be more thoughtful about and be conscientious about it it turns out that that for that mental frame of mind actually as you can imagine helps with finances as well right and so that that's really key the third one is around optimism and this might sound obvious but when people are dealing with financial difficulty or life difficulty their natural amount of optimism or pessimism has a huge effect on things and you often forget this in a bank when we give you regulated statements and communications and just we communicate you in a very dry way forget how important sometimes it is to just tell somebody I know this is a rough month someone in your family had an illness and you had to pull you had to take out credit card debt but you can do this and we can help and call us anytime and we've got your back like I don't ever remember bank talk to me like that and it turns out when you have more optimism you're much more likely to have the right kind of behaviors to get into that a good healthy financial state and the last one this one's really interesting this one is around do we see ourselves as a agent of change being able to control our world or do we actually think about everything else around us is what has control we learned this from a London school of economics professor who normally tasks his tasks with understanding the effectiveness of social impact given right so the bill Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will give 150 million to what elevate the status of women in West African villages and they will do a before and after survey and they'll ask people do you feel in control of the changes that you can make to make your life better and if people feel like they're not in control then they kind of act that way if they feel like they are in control and it's on them then there's a lot more agency so this is a totally new landscape for us and so you guys coming to agile India like what else in this guy talking about DevOps and like you know how we can do technology better it turns out like this really messy human stuff is pretty darn important to the actual tactical nuts and bolts of managing your finances and so we're starting to think about how do we create personas Alan Cooper of course was here last year and thinking about how the evolution of that space we're trying to think about these mindsets and how might we do things differently for different people depending on where they're at so a Christopher who doesn't have as much kind of confidence financial confidence and financial agency kind of might require a different way of being connected to and communicated with whereas a Roxanne who is higher on some of those locus of control and optimism she just really needs a kind of a high five and I like your on track kind of go for it right when she actually doesn't need a lot of the detail and so the question for us is how do we create a design system in finance that works like this so here's one example some of our customers have repeated patterns of going into overdrafts which is kind of an early sign for getting into financial difficulty and you can spiral out of control with all these fees and all of that so one of our suggestions is well let's take someone who isn't very conscientious who's kind of failing the marshmallow challenge in their own financial life and you know and that at the particular time of the month when they're more likely to go into overdraft maybe just or a week before send them a notification and say hey just heads up here's some upcoming bills that are coming out just so you might be aware right so that we can as a system we can hold some of that conscientiousness for you so you don't have to change who you are you can just be your natural kind of more careful financial self and just have the system kind of help give some nudges that would result in you just being a little bit more conscientious perhaps that week so that you don't have to get that notification from us you went into overdraft right so be a little more proactive we're starting to think about goal setting in a new way for a lot of us like setting goals can be hard or having being specific so why not use all of the data we have around your transactions and then proactively recommend to you a couple of specific goals which you can change at any time and again nudge and prompt you to adjust those and then finally why don't we just give you more encouragement in high fives instead of like hey you just wanted to overdraft and you know that's not really good and here's what you need to do like why don't we just actually the months that you don't go into overdraft give you a high five and think about loyalty program or rewards to encourage you on that journey and then the other thing in our language and again this is this is an early prototype thinking but all of banking information is about the past when you think about it our monthly statements all of our transaction stuff and what if we and then we can't really change the past we get insights in the past but what if we started to think about an interface that maybe this is now and the majority of the interface was about the future we can start to get predictive about your spend line you can kind of start to put on iphone with different kind of repeated bills that are coming out and just start to engage with you on that process and think we've got the future in a way and then of course we're thinking about the you know machine intelligence and AI and virtual systems where you can kind of go from asking a chat box a question to realizing that's actually a human conversation to then actually going to directly into a branch kind of face-to-face conversation so how do we have a design language that intercedes in the right places at the right time and again i'll show you something really that's a prototype phase but when you think beyond mobile what would a more dashboard life space and i remember we were looking at some of these comps and someone says well you know this isn't facebook or twitter or snapchat like why do you have this you know why do you have someone's photo on there it's just their banking account we're like well if you want to get people connected to their finances why not actually set the expectation that's my finances so again you can see things here around my goals and my life and dashboards and kind of the future but anyway just i want this is kind of what is starting to look like tangibly for us is how do we take a financial system which is really difficult to understand and make it more simple and i'm going to wrap up with um about storytelling and about metaphor so stories are fundamental to us um stories have been used ever since there were human beings to communicate values and culture and expectations and so at a bank we realized that that's kind of missing with your finances and so we ended up we actually built an experiment we created a storytelling team with filmmakers with storyboard artists with screenwriters and like they've done some pretty incredible stuff here's a little sampling of this 23 person storytelling team just over the past three months so one of the things that we did is we took agile teams and we took all these backlogs and these epics and these we actually use that language right in in agile we use the word stories right and chapters and epics and we decided to create a graphic novel about what would life feel like if the most important things of those 200 those 200 okay ours came to life in a really human way and this was only this wasn't like a big vision piece this was just in a 12 month time period and so this was the graphic novel that we ended up creating which told the story about how does how does all of this technical work come together how can finance insight help ordinary families get a grip on their hand on their finances and notifications and communications can be more human in real time how can we actually support you in the world in the real world without being logged into your banking your internet banking model and lots of other pieces and concepts that just started to bring a sense of momentum and humanity into how we do work and so we've only done this a couple of months ago I think the jury's still out on how tangibly this moves us forward but at least the conversation and the energy has been a lot more human and actually in that work there was this notion about financial growth and the team started visualizing it as like a little fish metaphor aquarium and it's like what if that's so powerful to be taught in schools what if it can be the way that like the parents can introduce their children to finance this is a new kind of concept of a cafe slash accelerator bank where multi-generational conversations happen where this grandma and the granddaughter you know education of finances happily across family lines and the and the fish was just like a placeholder it's like we weren't sure what the metaphor would be but it actually started a really cool conversation this is the the archives of the bank of scottland which is one of the four bankers uh uh banking brands and we went to the archives and was so cool to actually go down and see the founding documents from like the 1500s and uh this document particularly you guys know what this is yes this is a ledger and it's so interesting because you know back in the day the ledger wasn't the way that bankers innovated if there was like a ted talk in the 1500s someone some there'd be a banker on stage that would be like hey guys i just went to my church and they don't have piles of paper for every single transaction what they do is they take a big book and they record one line for every charitable contribution and they like give structure to it here's the date here's the amount here's the time and because they're really efficient and wouldn't that be such a cool way to manage your finances searchable it's compact all of that and and so the whole financial industry in the 1500s saw that innovation and said that's the model that's how we need to manage finances and it revolutionized data recording you know long before computers and spreadsheets were created now that's awesome but when you look at the existing financial applications today we still just use the ledger like it's been 400 years like i think that it's probably time for a new metaphor or some new way of understanding finances because clearly the current metaphor isn't helping a lot of us with our money in a really weird way and so what's so interesting about the storytelling team is they help us think about metaphor as a way of connecting in so if you guys remember i was around during this time but this punch card was the first way of interacting with computers see a couple people nodding their heads so these were from jack hard jack hard meeting rooms from the 1800s this is the first interface this is the first metaphor for how to humans connect with machines we then had this breakthrough of command line interfaces which many of you engineers still use today right to kind of access the system and then what was really interesting in this guy tim mott at xerox park he was doing co-creation with people in xerox park how do ordinary people understand computers and as he was having a lunch break he went and he wrote this down and this is called the office schematic he said what if we instead of a command line interface or punch cards what if we had you know a screen with a mouse and we had this desktop and what if there were files and a trash bin and what if these fundamental things of print and delete you know could be worked out and this became the prototype that steve jobs then took slash stole into the first mac and democratize access to technology we're still this metaphor completely changed computing as we know it and so i don't know exactly what our napkin sketch is going to be in banking but we're trying to create that moment so our designers went into a branch and we started having conversations with actual people and we had them actually finish this question my finances are like and haven't draw it out to check these out these are not like ledgers at all and actually there's a lot of negativity right check this out my finances are like an endless to-do list or i like this one an open prison this one is crazy it's like emotionally i feel totally trapped with my finances i don't know what to do but the door to the prison is open if i just had the right knowledge i could get out of it i'm so interested as to understand the mental model and then my favorite here the leaky bucket like the leaky bucket is so i have this thing called the well that's where my income is coming in and i've got this barrel where i want to save and i've got a little bucket which is my wallet and i just you know i take some of my my money and i'm on the way to the savings but along the way i get starbucks and netflix and fred almanje or whatever and by the time i actually try to like empty my bucket there's nothing left like such an interesting way to help people think about their finances in a way that's just much more intuitive than just a bunch of numbers so we're at the beginnings of taking this research and this insight and applying it to banking but my hope is that if i'm able to come back next year it'll not be the behind the scenes of them in the making up it'll be a little bit more of a world's premiere of what hopefully will be kind of new metaphor that can power banking a much more creative way so thank you so much for your time i love just getting past this conversation and getting your thoughts on how we can help ordinary people make sense of money if you have any experiments or learnings or suggestions which fully open to your thoughts i would love to hear that thank you so much i think we have maybe one or two minutes time for one or two questions or one questions yeah it is kind of asking for some suggestions i am handling the payment sector b2b payments and where i have to deal with the b2b financial steps as well with my stakeholders i have done my engineering and i had not done any masters in finance but so far i'm able to get to know okay what is the liquidity what is the cash flow rebate rate the cost kickback markup beyond exchange rate that kind of stuff but what is your suggestion like should i be getting into the finance or is it kind of manageable stuff being holding an engineering degree i think you don't have to be a designer to start connecting with the people you're designing for and involving them in the process and i think it'd be really powerful for you regardless of your backgrounds to when you're looking at the scenario to not just do kind of a use case analysis of let me just take the current state and then let me do a service design map and kind of like what can we do that's that's new if you can involve folks in the process i mean even b2b transactions you have a you have a customer right it's a business customer and they're trying to get something done and i think in the business side there's a lot more stress in getting it wrong right if you do if you have a transaction that's not the right time and there's not liquidity and you can't meet payroll like the level of complexity that's required in that situation so i would actually just involve folks there in a little bit of role-playing and improv around what the future could be like and sometime now it's really hard you can imagine a suited business banker who is like in a tie doesn't have a lot of time for you and trying to get them to get creative with like crayons and paper or like that's tough look at liz sanders work go to maketools.com it looks horrible on a on a mobile phone because she used flash but anyway go to a desktop site some of the tools that she used would be a great starting point for you to get a little bit more inspiration into how to take business transaction and actually turn that into something that's more powerful