Hello - I’m a software engineer and I’ve been at RBS for quite a while primarily as a developer and tech lead.
I’ve now found myself in our innovation labs, discovering, unboxing and building new products with new technology.
We have only being going about a year and I am going to talk about our experience moving into the innovation space and how we’ve had a learn a few things pretty quickly
In the last year I’ve learnt a number of things about innovation, which as I found out, is not always to do with new technology in a risk adverse organisation.
This presentation is about my experience discovering if we can create, build and deliver new ideas to the organisation
Quick show of hands
who works for a big organisation?
who works for a startup?
who is a developer?
who is a bass player?
So, we could do this two ways
And there are two versions of this that I could do…
The shiny version
I tell you about all the amazing things we’re doing in our organisation and tell you that we are really creative and getting everything right all the time. You ask me a couple of questions that I field really well and we leave at the end and go our separate ways.
The not so shiny version
We put our large organisation on trial - and maybe yours too, I’ll tell you about our experiences, what has worked, what does n’t, and how we may have learnt something from our failures.
While we wait for blockchain to be our new golden source of info - I thought I’d check wikipedia for the definitions of innovation. What is innovation? - ultimately it’s about generating new ideas to improve our business and then implementing them.
So our piano was a new idea back in 1700 - pretty much an invention
- an awesome instrument - that really met the needs of the customer being able to play music in several different keys with touch sensitivity and a projecting sound.
The iPhone piano app - this represents putting an existing business problem onto a new platform (in this case I’d argue it’s not that effective, other than enabling me to annoy people on the train in the morning- which would be really hard with the original piano)
Then we have kind of technology for technologies sake - this guy is clearly having a great time - but it’s probably not for everyone or not particularly useful.
Lastly - I think, this is the sweet spot - where we find a new technology and use it well- this app is morphwiz which really plays to the strengths of the iPhone’s touch surface.
We want to be number one for trust and customer advocacy
people want instant access without compromising security
people want to bank in all sorts of different ways - mobile, internet, some still want branches and telephone banking.
Me, I just want my finances to run themselves - so I can do other things.
Our range of customers is massive, from millennials (if you believe they exist), businesses from small startups to massive corporates and then an ageing population that still wants to party!
And they all want the best service in the way they want it.
We have stiff competition - over 20 banking licences were applied for in 2016
Monzo has a great phone app and instance payment responses - we need to keep innovating ourselves to stay relevant.
We have the technology, it’s more diverse that it has ever been,
new ways to gather data - IOT
new ways to secure and share data - Blockchain
- value is provenance
- single version of the truth
new ways to analyse data - AI / ML
This will enable us to get real personalisation, that is not just based on coarse grained demographics and help us know our customers better.
The potential for blockchains to connect supply chains enabling us to make secure and instance payments and transfers of value will create new ways of doing business and reduce the cost of doing it.
One of the key use cases of blockchain is provenance - i.e proving that you did something and when you did it - this is particularly valuable for publishers of digital media which can currently be easily copied and distributed without the author’s knowledge.
Lastly quantum computing - will enable us to solve problems, that currently require prohibitive compute for conventional computers. Quantum also threatens the current private/public key security model and so we must be mindful of this when looking into the future.
We’ve learnt from the design community embracing their disciplines and people and with it bought a new bunch of skills into the bank
Our working environments are changing to foster different working styles and thinking.
These pictures are of our open experience (OX) studio in Gogarburn - a really nice place to work.
Putting design thinking into practice:
We run innovation cells that look deep into our current processes & client relationships.
We pull apart current approaches and ideate on the new.
We test these ideas with customers and produce propositions for these new lines of business.
We also run shorter google sprints - this really depends on the size of the problem.
This was one of my first experiences of a design thinking cell - working surrounded by copious post it notes and rapid iterations with our clients.
->> you may have noticed that the groovy london office is not present - it’s currently being refurbished!!!
Out of the cells, google sprints and sometimes just from a random brilliant Idea, we build a minimum viable produce which we can demonstrate to our business stakeholders and customers.
The ingredients are:
1) Take some new technology
2) Take a business problem
3) Get a team of experienced developers and feed them coffee and pizza, and beer (if they are lucky)
4) build a product in 4 days.
we’ve done around 16 of these in the last 18th months.
Sometimes, someone else is doing it better
For this we connect with the startup community via our scouting team.
We have also co-located ourself with startup incubators:
1) entrepreneurial spark in Gogarburn
2) Rocket space in London - soon to be open
3) - this is the output of one of these exercises - a small/medium enterprise lending platform based on ezbob
4) This is dogpatch labs at Ulster bank in dublin - here, our tech team are colocated with start ups !
So you can do all this design thinking and MVP building - in a way, thats the easy bit - but how do you get your stake holders to engage?
They may not be ready for your great idea
They are probably busy with their day jobs - have a whole pipeline of work - have end of year targets - why should they bother with your great idea?
So, like any good product start up…
we have to think like a start up….
Actually - it should be more ‘think like a start up of a start up’
Every new product will require a different approach, a different set of stake holders and different sources of funding.
But again we need to think about, how we market, how we pitch, brand and ultimately procure funding for a new proposition.
Another way in which we get to hone our startup / pitching experience is to run hackathons, internally and in the case of the one above externally.
I thought hackathons were about just building products with code, but actually they require a vast range of skills - and are really good for bruising the ego !
We’ve done these in Edinburgh, Bangalore, Tel Aviv
and most recently at Ulster bank in Dublin with about 270 participants (see photo above)
The other great thing is that senior stakeholders to join these so we get access to the top management !
If you want to know more - go to the site:
www.bankofapis.com
Thinking about it, we’ve been doing the ‘product creation’ and dragons den thing for nearly ten years now.
Our Enterprise Engineering program (EEP) takes 4 teams of 6 senior developers and trains them up to present and pitch new ideas to senior stakeholders.
I really started my ‘innovation’ career on this program
Secondly , we have run internal coding competition, to find innovative developers and engage the technical community.
My favourite was Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spoke which was a trading game based on the Big bang theory. We had 50 teams writing algo’s to play this game against each other.
We are always looking for people with open ears, and there are several ways we have done that:
We do a lot of internal and external talks, particularly on blockchain where we know this is a difficult technology to communicate - it’s almost like running round your business stakeholders telling them about relational databases!
My analogy for getting blockchain into the bank is like the bit on family guy where they are trying to get the sofa onto the millennium falcon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ao5wiaze1TQ
We also are about to host our own hyper ledger meet up which will engage our banking community and other banks as well
Here’s the link
https://www.meetup.com/Hyperledger-London/
(this is obviously London centric - apologies to those of you in Scotland)
We released a white paper on tuning ethereum blockchain
so that we could meet The Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) standards of 100 tons per second.
We are currently in the process of open sourcing the code
The paper can be found here:
https://emerald-platform.gitlab.io/static/emeraldTechnicalPaper.pdf
We are keen to collaborate with other organisation on blockchain - so this paper and opening sourcing the code is a good way to communicate and connect
In the case of blockchain - we know that it will only work if we collaborate with other companies.
The R3 group (http://www.r3cev.com/) is a consortium of over 70 banks that want to exchange value with blockchain.
R3 gives us the legal framework to work with other banks and share IP and knowledge
They have also built their own ‘distributed ledger’ which is inspired by blockchain, but built for finance:
http://www.r3cev.com/blog/2016/4/4/introducing-r3-corda-a-distributed-ledger-designed-for-financial-services
We do all these things and our great and wonderful idea rocks up at a dragons den style pitch.
And we sometimes fail…
some people are so offended, they left banking and went to climb everest
but why..
if it does n’t look good - it is n’t good
If you are just going to show your user’s your blockchain log - then it’s ain’t going any where.
it’s a proof of concept - but it does not really reflect the reality that the current users see every day - then it’s going to be rejected.
Having the data to back up your invention is really important, but
sometimes you don’t have the data.
And in order to get the data you need the product to collect it.
but you can’t build the product because you need the data.
This is really where taking risks comes into it - i.e. did Steve jobs have any data on the iPhone before launching it?
Sometimes we find ourselves stuck in the paradox of
We’ve already got one of those - it’s too expensive to replace - and if we got a new one, why would it be better -> bit like paying for a service for your car and getting the same thing (or worse) back
or - that’s way too new it’ll never work in your organisation
they don’t have time
and it’s not the right time
Your business stakeholders may like what they see, but their workstack is full - and they don’t really have any reason to use it your new tech even if it is amazing.
So it could be a great idea at the wrong time - or your stakeholders are just not thinking about the problem you are trying to solve at that moment.
ideas take a while to permeate into people’s minds - so playing a waiting game is good.
Sometimes, the potential of what you put in front of people is not understood - and the general masses generally don’t accept it - I call this technical or conceptual senility - take my parents and mobile phones - they turn it off when they are not using it - somehow, they sort of understand the technology, but are also missing the point on some level - i.e using an old model of ‘phone’ on a new type of phone.
Blockchain is particularly hard to explain with its…
mining , crypto currencies, public keys, nodes, blocks and chains, merkle trees.
If after all the knock backs you are still convinced you have a good idea - what do you do then?
Abandon your ego and decide for yourself if it’s a good idea.
Assume it’s your fault that you did n’t communicate with well enough or you did n’t find the right people at the right time.
If you believe it - do it anyway!
if you are still convinced that your idea is a good one - keep hold of it.
your idea is like a pilot light - keep it burning - you’ve done most of the hard work - understanding why it failed to reach people is the most important lesson to learn.
Often you need to wait and then repackage it and re-launch it.
Containerisation is a good example - google have been doing this for 10 years - we discovered - this took three years to reach a point where the organisation was ready to take it onboard.
If other people are doing it already - it’s an easier sell - it’s a ‘me too’
We are not alone - I think most big organisations are going through this - I spoke to one guy at another bank - and we could have been working at the same place.
so that gives an example of the approaches we are taking to innovation - and the troubles we face.
So, the question to ask is - do you think our organisation and your organisation is the right place for new ideas?
Thank you for listening !
(at this point there will be either rapturous applause or tumbleweed - and then you’ll find out if this presentation as a good idea).
