Katie Dill, Head of Design, Stripe;
Janaki Kumar, Head of Design, Commercial Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co; 
In conversation with: Brian O’Keefe, FORTUNE 

Brainstorm Design 2022 - Redesigning Finance

Conferences

when polled a few americans might say they love their bank. Traditional banks have had difficulties deploying new technology at scale and despite investments in mobile banking, some continue to lose clients to neo bank. As financial services undergo a digital transformation. What role should designers play? Design executives from two different financial firms are here to share how they are creating value added products and compelling customer experiences. Please welcome Jon AKI Kumar, head of design commercial bank Jpmorgan and Chase Katie Dill, head of design at stripe and joining them on stage is brainstorm design co chair Ryan. Mhm. Then alright as Kristin said, two very different kinds of financial companies. We're we're here to talk about redesigning finance. We have one of the biggest banks in the country and and a growing large fintech but coming coming up the same problem or the same challenge from different directions. I'll start with you johnny key when people think of like you know Chase or any kind of big you know, traditional banking company, they don't necessarily think of design or design culture. So and especially commercial banking, tell us how what the real story is on the inside. What is the challenge to build that culture. Thank you for that question. The fact that people don't think that there is design is the very reason we need design and more designed. Right? I think um the commercial banks of small businesses all the way to large businesses and different verticals and um it's really vital that they are the recipients of great design and what happens inside this organization as um the mission that are set for our team is a humanized financial services. So what we've observed in this, you know, very large and successful bank is that there are world class experts in different financial products, whether it's card or line of credit Treasury services, um and so many others. Right? But there there is a the role of design is to tell the story of the client and help us bring together the right products and services in service of the client. So that's essentially how we are trying to transform commercial bank. I think that such a common problem for big legacy companies that have developed so much expertise and develop product lines to satisfy all kinds of niche, you know, use cases and everything and there was no, it wasn't it wasn't not built at once. It was built piecemeal. So that problem of just asking questions probably is the beginning part of it, but like how do you, do you know, what's an example of how you can take uh design your your design team and go into one of those scenarios and make it more seamless, especially to the customer coming in to try to make sense of what you're offering them. Yeah, I think internally we start with storytelling right, we tell the stories of our clients, we put the products in context of what the client's needs are and what other, you know, conflicting priorities or other considerations they may have as they are trying to access the banking products and I think that just the storytelling helps people empathize with the clients and that's already a great start. And um yeah, and then you know, we try to really use language we have, you know, not just interaction designers, visual designers, we also have copywriters. So we try to make sure that we speak to the user in every way possible so that we can connect our financial products and services to their needs. How big is your team and how much has it grown and you know, how much, how much do you have to lobby? Uh you know Jamie Diamond to give you more resources? Yeah, so I know, I think to, to be, to be fair to jpmorgan is a huge organization and I'm only part of commercial bank, there is Consumer Bank Investment Bank and in fact those design organizations are larger than ours. Um commercial bank is small but mighty and growing. Um and I'm 60 at the moment and we are constantly growing. So you're if you were speaking to Jamie you'd say you need you need more people. I mean honestly everybody knows how hard it is to hire talent. So um I I just want to make sure that we, you know most of my job is setting up the environment where design can succeed, right? It's I don't really believe in just throwing resources without fully creating the consideration the environment for success. So one of the other aspects of the product experts that I spoke about earlier, they call themselves product managers or product owners, right? But we all know when we're creating digital products, that's, that's a whole another skill sets that's needed to be a product owner in that environment. So we are also kind of trying to create training curriculums for product owners so that they can be excellent stakeholders for us and also creating a platform mindset, going to Fin techs of the world where we don't have to build every single capability ourselves, right? We if we create a platform, we can also partner and leverage some of the skill sets that are around us. And at the end of the day it's all about the clients. So let's transition to Fintech, let's, we'll go to Katie. So um I mean I just want to start with you on the fact that you actually are relatively new at strike because you, you joined, I think you said last March and you've worked previously at Airbnb En left. So two very well known apps that probably everybody here has used their very consumer focused. So what was it like to go from those two incredible experiences to a company that's uh that's more enterprise focused, that's not a, you know, individual consumer focused company. Yeah, you know March last year and boy time moves very strangely these days. Uh so uh it has gone by in a blink, but I feel like a lot has changed at the same time moving into stripe, which for me was different from one, it was, you know, it's in the financial space to, it is mainly be to be focused of course, uh you know, it was definitely a bit of a learning curve. Uh I think some of the things that made it easier for me to move into was the fact that I had already been in these hyper growth technology based companies. So I'm used to a lot of change, I'm used to things growing pretty fast but what was very interesting and as we're moving into the B two B space of course is the role of sales uh in the way that our relationships with our users are at a whole nother level, you know, these are users are for the most part businesses, businesses of all sizes could be a startup of one person or it could be a fortune 50 like amazon and can we just pause this for people who probably have heard of stripe but don't really fully know how it works like what is the biggest source of revenue for you guys? Like how does you know what's the model, like how would you sum it up well where it all started with payments taking payments online, helping companies actually get their businesses going and take payments online. That was 10 years ago we now have, I think over 14 different products that have evolved and and and built off of that initial colonel. But the whole idea is that we're helping businesses start and grow their organization largely built on financial infrastructure and the businesses that we serve our of all different sizes, many of them are helping direct customers, but many of our businesses are also just helping other businesses like Shopify and these organizations are you know, looking to us to help them achieve their goals and their opinionated about it as they should be. These products that we build for them, you know, make or break, you know, their their business success. This could be their dream company that they always wanted to start. And so of course they have really strong conviction on what they're looking for and there, you know, informed and they have good reason to, you know, essentially have influence on what we build. So our in many ways that we interact with them through user research of course through support through sales through any number of means, including just directly emailing us and telling us what they think, which we crave. We love this uh really helps to inform the work we do. And that was different coming from the consumer company where yes, you might have millions using your product every day and you have, you know, maybe get support interactions or twitter interactions, but it's a very different relationship uh and I am seeing that now and I'm seeing the benefits of the fact that we have, you know, sales for example, helping inform the work that we do. It's like we have this like army of researchers kind of like googled us an army of researchers to help us build better products. Yeah, I just remind everybody raise your hands if you have questions, we have mix and we'll, we'll get to you. So you, you had some news today, you announced some Katie, some new product offerings. Do you want to tell us, give us the highlights of that? Yes, yes at noon Eastern Standard time today we had our event stripes sessions where we launched a lot of new things. The big thing that I'm very excited about is the stripe app marketplace. So now third parties, uh, you know, various businesses of all sizes can build apps into the stripe dashboard and really what we're doing there is we're basically joining forces with other organizations to improve the experiences of our various business users. So if you're running a business, let's say you are, you know, a plumber and you're, you know, doing various types of things. You don't want to go to seven different products to manage your business, one to do payments, one to do taxes, one to do revenue recognition, I want to do your support calls, whatever it might be, these are a lot of things that you're trying to manage and so what we're seeing is an opportunity to bring these things closer together kind of like as you talked about the importance of ecosystem and you know, recognizing where your expertise are, but also you know, creating moments of uh interlock between other organizations so that can be better for them. So for example, one of the apps that we launched or we'll be launching in the next couple of weeks uh is with Dropbox, so if you're running a business and you're doing various payments related work within stripe, but you want to file that away in a certain folder, for example, in your dropbox account. Now it's all linked up. You don't have to be like switching between various tabs or various apps. So it's really about just bringing, you know better user experiences, things that we all as humans expect, right? You can order and get your groceries on your doorstep in an hour. You know, these are people that are also running their businesses and want that same kind of access and instantaneous help with what they're doing Janicki you know, we were talking backstage about um you're you're mentioning the example of somebody coming to chase for alone and then realizing the opportunity there strikes me as from a, you know, from your own different point of view, similar kind of thinking about building blocks on top of the original, you know, services that you're providing and just being able to first of all recognize what clients might want and then deliver on that, but could you just kind of walk us through like you know what what this process was of realizing this opportunity and then how you address that, you know absolutely, you know, very similar lines of thinking, right? How do we serve the client more holistically? Um so in this, in this particular case that I was describing to you, it's a case of commercial real estate, you know, there are landlords who may have a small building or a large building and Chase or JPMorgan Chase traditionally gives loans to them to buy this building. Right? And when we spoke, we did ethnographic research and spoke to all the bankers who interact with these clients and ask them what do you do? And they are on the phone a lot with these clients who are asking them a whole host of questions. Should I buy this building, Do you think that you know the net operating income, is that going to be okay? Is that is that neighborhood? You know, doing well. Should you know, my water heater has broken, do you know a good contractor, I'm paying X amount for my insurance. Is that too much? You know, so they're asking all of these questions and also they need to know, you know, they need to collect rent And as we know the world is not all digital right? There are still people who are collecting checks and whatnot and they have to run behind their tenants and you know, there's, there's a lot of complexity in our small business owners hands and property owners tenants. So, what, what we did was we unpack that and we told the story of this property investor and we told them, okay, roughly how much of it. So you got a loan from Chase. So how much is that? How, how much percentage of that contributes to your success? And they said 5% Getting alone is 5% but the 95% means I have to buy the right building. I have to get the income from my tenants. I have to do all the other things that I have to do. And so that's how it we asked them, you know, and, and the client managers don't have the, um, don't have the time to give that level of dedicated support to all the clients. Right. So we are saying, how do we democratize that level of support to everyone? And we can use technology for good here. We can make every, every property investor successful because they have the right numbers, they are investing in the right buildings, they're setting the right rent and they're doing their business in a healthy way. And ultimately, you know, what, I was struck by joining Chase, is that how purpose driven, uh, the organization is, and we can make a direct correlation to the availability of affordable housing in urban areas by helping our property investors be successful, right? Because availability of affordable housing is a supply problem. There's plenty of demand. We just need to get the supply up and running and that's what we're all about. What portion of the business you're doing in the commercial bank now is like fully digitized. Do you know? It is, you know, so there are platforms of different legacy platforms and one of the it hasn't been built with that platform mindset that we we mentioned. So part of our journey is really bringing some of these technologies together, but we are investing in a whole new set of technologies to just make it modern and modular and ecosystem based and so on. Just you mentioned that um, I just wanted to bring this up also that, that uh the executives still get questions from Wall Street about why you're investing so much in technology, which I find hilarious in 2022 when uh, that's not a question you would ever get uh you know, why are you investing so much here in technology? But everybody wants to have seamless digital experience, you know, where are we gonna get that if we don't build it? Right. So, um, I wanted to ask you guys both about trust a little bit um, you know, the the giant bank that handles your money that you know, trust is imperative and and people forgive a little friction if they feel like they can trust it with stripe. You know, they want, as you mentioned, they want that instant, you know, service, but they also don't want to sacrifice on trust so and security of their transactions and just Katie, I'm just curious like um you know, coming in For you, working on designing these, these B2B experiences where it's a different trust obviously and what you were doing before it left paramount, but different experience now. So how do you build that into the design process? Oh yes, trust is critically important. I mean, I think the interesting thing about the work that we do is that one, it's a novel experience oftentimes right that people are not necessarily experts in managing their finances or you know, maybe even, you know, different stages in their business organization, they don't necessarily have the expertise and the type of work that we do, so it's new to them, secondly, it's extremely important and that thirdly it is, you know, frankly pretty personal as well, you know, a lot of the organizations that we work with might be startups as mentioned, but all the way up to larger organizations and so when we are designing that experience, we have to be also sensitive to all of that, right? Because you are talking to somebody who's maybe an expert in their field, but that doesn't mean they're an expert in finances and you want to make sure that you're communicating to them clearly, uh but also with the level of transparency that can help to earn and burn that urn and leverage that trust and then thirdly maintaining it. So, you know, I think probably we both in our work care a lot about the details and the excellence to craft, but it's a business imperative well beyond the things that you know, people in the past have taken, you know granted for because it's those little things also that helped to maintain that trust, like if we can't dial in that experience, then you you're gonna wonder what's happening under the hood for example, and I think when we're talking about, you know, kind of the meld of, you know, finance and technology, uh you know, we're seeing it both ways, right that there are aspects to uh finance that technology companies are bringing into their everyday, we, you know, are we refer to it as banking as a service. But for example, Shopify is you know, one of the users that we worked really closely with and for the last couple of months they've been offering Shopify balance, which is essentially banking as a service where they can provide for the merchants a you know, they can do loans, they can do, you know, issuing credit cards or cards such that these businesses can use the money where they're making it and really streamlining that whole experience. And so, you know, I think of, you know, the type of work that my team does is it's just these many degrees of separation within this larger ecosystem. We're trying to build the right thing for Shopify, who's building the right thing for their merchants, who are building the right thing for their users. And so this ripple effect, you know, has gotten to a whole nother level of complexity in trying to understand who your users are and designing something truly great such that it feels dialed in and earn their trust. Yeah, I have a different lens on the trust issue. I think people do trust, uh, chase or JPMorgan and that trust is not misplaced. The reason why I say that is as designers, when you work in a large financial institutions and some of you may know what I'm talking about. Their legal and compliance have an equal stake at the table when we're designing experiences and you know, as as a designer, it may feel like a burden. It may feel like, oh, there's one more person I have to check. I cannot just take a cloud product and integrated into my intimate, they have to go through a very rigorous process. Right? So what I have, our team has done is integrated legal and compliance Partners into our design process. So I have what we call the 5D design process and they have a seat at the table. So we share our early designs with them. We tell them the story of the user and why we need to do it this way. And I think this in a way my legal and compliance friends are very receptive, you know, so they want to be involved, they want to be engaged. And uh, so that, that one other dimension that, that differentiates right Working in Fintech causes a large bank. It may feel a little bit slower, but I think at the end of the day it's the price you pay, but also on behalf of the playing, thank you so much to both of you for sharing all the exciting stuff you're doing in the traditional world of banking and the world of Fintech join me in thanking him.