Mini Innovation Projects Part 2

lion’s cage for bank of singapore

I was assigned as sole UX designer in this project’s agile team at Bank of Singapore.

Lion’s Cage was an innovation challenge project pitched by an internal team in Bank of Singapore that comprises information systems architect, business analysts, fund managers, and me as their product designer. The aim of Lion’s Cage is to provide a seamless digitalised experience for high net-worth clients and relationship managers to create and execute their order fulfillment for private equity (PE) and mutual funds (MF) investment.

defining the Problem

While Singapore’s finance and banking industry stands as the beacon of progress and forward-looking opportunities in the Asia Pacific, I’d dare say that Bank of Singapore still has quite a long way in this aspect. As I was conducting my discovery interviews with relationship managers and PE/MF analysts, to my surprise, I learnt that many fund and private equity managers currently rely on pen and paper, and Excel spreadsheets to record and track clients’ orders. The process of order entries, due diligence, execution and after-sales happen separately across multiple platforms. As a result, there are delays in order execution for most of the time, that spans up to a week. This does not work well for financial products that have more short-term volatility such as mutual funds, as clients are at risk of being unable to capture their desired price and lot.

After whiteboarding workshops with the team, I mapped the current user journeys for PE and MF order processes involving 3 stakeholders interaction – the Client; the Relationship Manager’ and the Product Management Group (a finance team that analyses, curates and put up financial products for order).

prioritising short term and long term solutions

My team and I were consistently engaged in weekly whiteboarding sessions to discuss on existing constraints (e.g. technological, data, business constraints), potential opportunities (with external third-party data vendors), and important requirements to be prioritized for our first pilot roll-out, targeted in a couple months time. There were many things we had to consider such as the impact on our banking’s data architecture when we integrate with third-party solutions. This is an example of the envisioned system architecture with third-party integration, iCapital, which we mapped out during a brainstorming session:

Subsequently, these culminated into a long-term vision of Lion’s Cage to work towards through multiple project phases; as well as a short-term, pilot vision that focuses on the 2 stages of the user journey that forms the core of the end user’s experience (e.g. Enter platform to discover new investment opportunities; Engage with online pitchbook to consider placing an order). As the bank currently uses an existing digital platform for relationship managers to place an order on behalf, all we needed to focus on was to bridge these platforms together in near future.

it’s all about the money – the tough nut to crack

Lion’s Cage is no doubt going to be an expensive venture as the digital transformation of existing manual processes is going to require lots of data migration, data cleaning, and restructuring of the bank’s system data architecture, on top of building a seamless all-in-one platform for both banking clients and front desk staffs. Therefore, there is a need to prepare a good case to secure our management’s buy-ins and procure sufficient funding.

I was tasked to draft a one-pager proposal on our Lion’s Cage value proposition and the problems that we are trying to solve. This was done on Figma, where I decided that the best way to provide a comprehensive case was to breakdown the information on PE and MF since they are 2 slightly different user journeys, and illustrate how our solution helps converge these 2 financial product management aspects into 1 seamless experience.

Before that, I first needed to gather financial estimates and trade volume data in order to demonstrate the direct business benefits our solution brings to the company. For this, it took me quite a bit of time to hunt down the right person who could gather for me those data, consolidate and analyse the data to see if they are able to fulfil our pre-set success metrics from a UX, Costing, Revenue, Quality and Productivity perspective. All these taught me the value of stakeholder management as a UX designer.

Key Takeaways

While I was not able to see this project into fruition before I left the team, I was able to build cadence on this project for the team to take it forward. By the end of my tenure, the team has a clearer idea on the new vision and requirements that the order management system should achieve. We were also able to garner several months of support from top management after providing them our business pitch. Granted more time and resources, I would have definitely want to spend more time conducting user interviews with direct end consumers to validate my above hypothesized maps and planning.

Learning Lab Rebranding

Background: In mid 2021, our innovation department faced an organizational restructure that left us with 4 team members. We decided to rebrand our original ‘Springboard Innovation Group‘ into ‘Learning Lab‘, in order to work towards building a community of co-design, cross-functional experimentation and collaboration.

As such, as enablers of Bank of Singapore, our Learning Lab strives to support stakeholders in their digital transformation and innovation journey, amidst a fast-evolving technology landscape with shifting user demands. We practice a user-centric, dual-track approach in our experimentations, and work towards a vision to grow a banking community of innovative, lean and forward-thinking individuals.

Role: I was tasked to research and deep dive on how might we rebrand ourselves in areas of our core design principles, design system, and branding logos. My team lead, Kevin Boezennec, wanted us to experiment on bold, creative themes that elucidates our ‘forward-thinking, experimental-driven and community-based design’ vision. This was explored in attempt to make our innovation team’s branding more noticeable and different from the classic corporate themes that most teams in the bank tend to adopt.

New Learning Lab Logo

As such, I did some online research and mood boards to define the colour scheme and theme for our team. We decided to settle with a Doodle fontstyle. As I wanted to illustrate the divergent and convergent dynamics of the design process (i.e. for one, from the early stages of divergent thinking, to the converging stages of problem definition and design), I decided to explore and settle on the idea of scribbles in aquatic and earthly colour theme to evoke a sense of learning by doing, in a sustainable manner. The intentional messy scribbles symbolizes the divergent thinking process in design, and that by failing early, we also learn faster that way.

Branding template for a one-pager stakeholder report

Taking reference from the key principles of our new logo, I also created a kitchen sink infographics template which we needed to provide project reports to stakeholders. As we work closely with finance teams who are looking to find new or enhanced solutions to their current workflow, we consider them as end-user stakeholders whom we are responsible to report to on a weekly basis.

One good thing about working with internal stakeholders only was the autonomy and creative freedom we have to determine our branding amidst the bureaucracies of the corporate environment – there was no need to go through a hierarchal of approvals with the Marketing team and such. Henceforth, I started with a schematic wireframe to determine key information sections we should include in a standard weekly report. Following the same colour scheme and doodle-style theme, I explored on some doodle fonts and visuals. After several iterations and review with my team lead, this was the final result of our team’s report template:

design-thinking workshops & panel sessions

As part of Bank of Singapore’s Learning Lab mission, we host and facilitated design-thinking workshops, fireside chats and panel sessions to grow a banking community of innovative, lean and forward-thinking individuals. With only 4 of us in the team back then, I helped to coordinate, prepare the logistics and administration for the sessions, as well as develop presentation decks focusing on our dual-track agile framework agenda.

Flagship lego serious play workshop

Role: Co-facilitator, Workshop material preparations, Research on Lego Serious Play methodology

Background: At the beginning of our lab, my team wanted to come up with a flagship service that encourages internal stakeholders to think more creatively and openly, as part of our mission to grow a conscientious design community across the bank. My team came across Lego Serious Play, a facilitation methodology developed at The Lego Group. Its goal is improving creative thinking and communication by getting people to think with their hands. People build with Lego bricks 3-dimensional models of their ideas and tell stories about their models^..

As such, we decided to pilot a Lego Serious Play workshop for internal staffs to help them unleash their inner child while educating them more about the process of rapid prototyping and idea generation.

I found this methodology to be quite an interesting and versatile tool that can be applicable to so many areas of work. Not only does it teach you how to turn your ideas into reality using this alternative, psychological technique, tinkering with your hands on the go helps you overcome “analysis paralysis” as a result of overthinking.

Fireside Chat – Open Government Products by GovTech, Guest Speaker, Li Hongyi (Deputy Director)

Role: Facilitator, Tech support for virtual conference, Content materials preparation

Background: My team had the privilege to have Li Hongyi, the son of Singapore’s Prime Minister, and Deputy Director of the Singapore government’s technology and innovation agency, GovTech (also known as Open Government Products, OGP), to share more about the advantages of design-thinking in building communities.

It was our first flagship design thinking community kick-off for Learning Lab with over 75 participants in attendance. The OGP’s product team (Charmaine Lee, Carina Lam) shared their secret recipe behind some of their most successful Gov.sg products, and how their framework and approach can be harnessed to empower innovation, enhance inclusivity and scalability nation-wide.

Metaverse-themed Design Thinking Workshop for Internal Staff training

Role: Co-facilitator, Content material preparations

Background: We hosted a series of Metaverse-themed brainstorming workshops with 21 interns at Bank of Singapore to raise awareness and go wild on the possibilities of decentralised technology in finance.

How so in the case of centralised financial institutions like a bank you may ask? Well you can certainly bet that the interns had wow-ed us with their clever but over-the-notch, creative ideas! We came across highly original ideas such as the use of NFT for fractionalized art investments, environmental sustainability governance (ESG), and collateralised physical assets for high net-worth investors. The purpose of this workshop was also to look out for promising candidates to take their crazy NFT ideas forward in our subsequent Springboard Innovation Challenge – where they will be mentored by our design-thinking experts and supervisors to turn their ideas into real projects.