Surges in behaviours expose your service flaws
Over the last year, we’ve witnessed first hand that the basic human needs have been radically shaken up and transformed.
These transformations have in turn led to the emergence of new trends. One such trend is the ongoing merging of the digital and physical space. Many sectors and industries still struggle with what this new hybrid reality looks like, let alone what it means for the future of their business.
Fintech and the broader financial sector is one area that seems to be pulling in several different directions in terms of both opinions and even answers. Yet, if we dig even deeper, we see that the real effects of this new tug of war between digital and physical are being felt by the people who interact with the financial services. Both the customers and the employees are the ones shaping and being shaped by this fluid new movement.
Banking services have changed forever
One clear example of how these surges in human behaviours are impacting different types of financial experiences can be seen in the retail banking sector. When we analyse the physical space of the high street banks, we can see clear trends in terms of service users changing how they traditionally interact with these spaces. The number of people visiting physical stores has dropped significantly since the pandemic began. This is not surprising when we consider the number of banks across various markets that have either brought in access restrictions or closed altogether. This in turn leads to more and more people, both customers and employees, switching to a more digitally focussed way of working with banking. However, we can safely assume that customers won’t revert to their previous channel preferences in the long term.
Both the customers and the employees are the ones shaping and being shaped by this fluid new movement.
Managing disposable income
As we continue to face more prolonged lockdowns, and access to physical banks remains limited, many customers are looking for more innovative ways to manage their money. A number of these customers are in the fortunate position of finding themselves with more disposable income and fewer ways to spend it. With record-low interest rates drawing consumers away from putting this money into a savings account, many are ‘trying their luck’ with investing in the stock market for the very first time. Driven on by the increase in readily available platforms like Robinhood and Revolut’s banking application, what once seemed like a hobby for the few has become far more accessible for the many.
Design for trust
Yet this hasn’t come without its risks and disruptions. Only a few weeks have passed since it was widely reported that Robinhood, an investment and trading service app, found itself in the difficult position of having to raise an emergency $1 billion from existing investors just hours after it halted purchases of the GameStop stock, suggesting the free-trading app faced a potential cash shortage. Other financial service applications had to react quickly to halt their users’ ability to buy certain stocks. Hastily designed notifications were used to inform potential investors of the new restrictions, leaving many with a feeling of frustration, confusion and lack of trust. The surge in orders, driven in part by a single subgroup on Reddit, quickly exposed the risks faced by consumers who were rapidly adopting an increasingly digital way of managing their finances.
Both of these issues faced by the financial sector; the rapid reduction in utilisation of physical space and the rise of alternative consumer saving habits, also highlights the need for businesses and organisations to embrace more adaptive ways of working. To avoid the risk of failure. It’s unlikely that this is an issue that will resolve itself overnight. The question many companies now face, is how will this continual, fluid fusion between the digital and the physical develop over time and what does that mean for the future of the financial services they provide, both from a business and human perspective?
Plan for inevitable volatility
As human needs continue to morph and new trends continue to emerge, both at an unprecedented pace, businesses more than ever need to start evaluating how this ever-adapting landscape will transform their current business models, both now and in the future.
This is where design can play a big part in helping businesses both understand and plan for the future. For example, although both situations explored in this post seem to have played out very quickly, they actually took place over several months. It’s unlikely these businesses were completely unaware of the potential implications should the inevitable have happened.
In times of volatility — and this is a one — it helps to explore different possibilities and imagine any possible future scenario, and this is where design can play a vital role. People have ‘hunches’, usually informed hunches. What design teams are great at, is unpacking these hunches by investigating them and turning them into informed insights. Whether they chose to run iterative brainstorming sessions or explore the topic by interviewing experts, design teams can utilise well-versed toolkits to help preplan for inevitable volatility and scope future scenarios to the benefit of both the consumer and the business.
For financial and fintech businesses of all types and sizes, it’s vital to gain a better understanding of how these emerging trends and behavioural transformations will impact their plans now and in the future.
Adam Walker is the Experience Director at Manyone London. He specialises in applying ethnographic research techniques to projects and has done so successfully across Europe, East Asia and North and South America.
At Manyone, we are taking an iterative approach to this subject by continually challenging our own assumptions. Over the next few weeks and months, we will be publishing further studies and sending them out to our community. If you want to want to know more about these on-going deep dives, or simply want to discuss them further, please feel free to reach out and keep your eye out for the next instalment.
Manyone is a strategy-design hybrid. Visit us at Manyone.com or follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram.
