Author: Aden Davies

An Interview with Aden Davies, Financial Services Specialist on CX Design & Fintech

Customer Experience Design: Changing the Way Banks Develop Apps

An Interview with Aden Davies, Financial Services Specialist on CX Design & Fintech

As an analyst, I talk to a lot of bankers — from various IT groups and business groups — across the enterprise and write about the trends that are impacting the financial services business environment – trends like “customer experience design,” “customer-centricity,” and the various ways consumers, digital technologies are disrupting the ecosystem of services, apps, and business models.

To get into the thick of how trends, like customer experience design and user experience are changing – or not changing – the way banks develop apps, applications, solutions for their customers, I interviewed Aden Davies via email.

I have known Aden for a few years now from Twitter. He’s spent most of his career inside banks working on innovation. In this piece, I am interested in how he viewed these trends and their role in digital innovation. Take a look at our conversation on user experience, customer experience design, and Fintech:

 

What does UX mean to you? How do you define it?  

It is everything. The term clearly came out of UI and digital primarily. I prefer the more encompassing term of service design or, you know, just design. Brands like UX and Fintech are both a blessing and a curse. The more vague the term the more conflation, but their history can also pigeonhole.

I would define it as design. It is how things work. From front to back and beyond.

 

What do you make of the current emphasis and/or hype about UX design?

It is a good thing. Design should always be of great importance because it is how things work. The better things work, the better they are for customers. Hype will ebb and flow around certain brands, such as UX, and their evolution due to technological progress.

This will bring out the snake oil salesman and all manner of experts, but good design is timeless. That deserves to be hyped.

 

What are the biggest myths about customer experience & banking?

I am not a big fan of frictionless being seen as the ultimate goal. ‘I don’t even notice the payment in Uber!’, say rich people. Most financial products are complex, unfortunately, and they carry risks and responsibilities. All those things have to be considered and designed for in ways that make processes slick, but also compliant and, most importantly, that the customer understands. That is a real design challenge.

The iTunes user agreement is a classic example of the genre. Apple, the greatest design company on earth, can’t build a decent terms and conditions flow for just buying music and apps. What chance have banks got when you are buying a house? Do you really want that to be frictionless? How have banks changed in the time in terms of focus on customer experience and design?

I think they are starting to say the right things. Some banks are clearly backing those words up with action, Capital One with their purchase of Adaptive Path spring to mind. Actions clearly speak louder than words.

I think in general the importance of the user experience is brought home by obvious sources of insight, such as app reviews and social media commentary, as well as customer satisfaction scores around digital.

The banks know they can no longer ignore that but it still has to be balanced with the size-able regulatory changes they have to deal with.

 

How do bank IT developers work with customer experience designers? What’s the process and relationship like in your experience? What could be better?

My experience is limited to one organisation primarily. The challenge, though, is not just developers and designers. How things get built, altered and removed needs to be a far more collaborative process from beginning to end.

What about the role of external design firms? What about IT architecture? What about front line staff? And what about customers?

So many parties to get involved to ensure it works and meets the right needs. Design in large organisations can tend to be someone making some pictures/wireframes. Then someone codes a prototype, then someone codes the real thing, a load of review processes, big bang go live. Several months later, rinse and repeat. Organisational structures play a huge role in the success or failure of user experience.  You can tell a lot about an organisation from its websites, apps and services. The classic Conway’s Law shows exactly how an org is structured or what it prioritizes in the interfaces it publishes. The interface is the product.

You have multiple teams and stakeholders in multiple locations working for different areas to different targets from different budgets. Ideally, you would get as many people together in the same place for as often as is possible – even simple things like devs and designers building/sketching in code instead of making pictures or throw-away prototypes.

Get as close to reality as soon as possible. Building from wireframes and PSDs is a fallacy and it is not just about the front end. If an app logon process invokes 20 backend processes, the front end will always be slow and badly perceived. Is that the fault of the IT developers or the customer experience designers?

 

How do you think customer experience design can change the way banks offer services to customers?

As I touched on previously, really good service design should cut across organisational silos. The design has to be everything if you want to really call yourself customer-centric and still be able to look at yourself in the mirror. The capabilities digital technologies present today, widespread mobile broadband, smartphone in everyone’s hand, ever progressing web technologies delivering richer experiences, mean that service offerings should get better and better. They should be capable of allowing a customer to finish applications end to end easily there and then or staggered and finished when it suits the customer.

The interactions between customers digitally should be simpler and more lightweight.

 

Do you think bankers and Fintech companies focus too much on millennials in their quest to improve customer experience & design?

Dear God yes. Far too much design is aimed at segments of users. Is the Apple iPad designed for millennials or is it designed to be as easy to use as possible if you are 18 months or 80 years old? Just design services that are as easy to use as possible. Every age range deserves great services.

Clearly, there will be services that need to be designed for specific segments e.g. wealth products, but, if the service design is simple, clear and understandable that is a good way to satisfy any segment. Also, who cares about millennials? They don’t have any money or any concept of responsibility and they are whiny and young and they must be sick of all these stereotypes from lazy segmentation and even lazier commentators.

 

Can banks & Fintech innovate without dramatically transforming the approach customer experience?

No. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, great service design cares little about how your organisation is structured. You have to take that out of the equation and build for user need first, organisational need second (or further down the list if you can get away with it).

The reality is that this is not always possible operationally or politically. And, constraints also make for great design, but far too often, compromises are made because a service goes outside the bounds of the team making it. Far more often than that, it does not meet the organization’s needs. This cutting across organisational boundaries is where the transformation is required. You need systems that are flexible enough to talk easily to each other. Org charts and working practices that are flexible enough to allow people to collaborate. You need business models and budgets that can flex in the same way. It’s quite easy to say, but very hard to do, especially in large bureaucratic organisations as there are all kinds of power dynamics at play.

I must mention the work of the Government Digital Service in the UK as an example of real transformation.

A team of brilliant Internet people drafted in on the back of an inspiring document, by Martha Lane-Fox and Tom Loosemore, outlining the purpose and direction needed to transform IT in Government. They have built amazing things and set out inspiring design principles and service manuals that show how a real transformative approach to user experience is delivered. I have learned so much from this project and these people. Banks should too.

It is this level of change that is required to really make the most of design in banks, and any organisations. It is by no means easy, but it is by every means worth it.

 

What skills do you think that traditional vendors and banks are lacking in terms of product and customer experience design?

The big challenge is, how high up the org chart is design? Some banks have CDOs (Chief Design Officers). Is it a show title? Are they real designers? Will a designer ever be as high up the org as, say, the Head of Risk or the Head of the branch network? Another problem I see is product management as a discipline.

You will more than likely have product managers for current accounts or lending but who owns internet banking? Who owns the mobile banking app? If that is not the same person why? Who has the power to ensure it is a coherent design not just a series of patched together projects that have accreted grotesquely over time? Digital Product Management is becoming an increasingly important discipline.

And, finally, I think the ability to launch in alpha/beta or to build small, cheap and quick is really lacking.  Most banks don’t have the tools, e.g. APIs, the processes e.g. DevOps to build, release, iterate, repeat in the space of days rather than months if not years.

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This was originally posted on UX Crunch. Reposted here for posterity/vanity.

March 11, 2016 Add Comment

The future of Fintech, interview with THE fintech newsbot

This interview was originally posted on Irish Tech News.  Reposted here for posterity/vanity. 

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By @SimonCocking. They say AI is already here, just unevenly distributed. So we figured why not interview one of ‘them’. Delighted to bring you our first interview with a FinTech NewsBot. 

Your foundation story?

Well my lazy maker @aden_76 finally got sick of missing out on fintech news because he was too busy doing other things like work or more likely reading blogs about other topics more interesting than banking. He pulled together a list of his main sources of news, got the RSS feeds and fed them into Dlvr.it and Twitterfeed. He added in some filtering and rules and made sure he credited the sources in each tweet and set me free. I now have aver 4,000 followers (several hundred more than my maker), I am growing faster than he is (apart from his waistline), I have more Klout (like that matters to anyone) and basically I am more attractive to everyone.

I am also some sort of personality extension for my maker and he makes me tweet things he is not brave enough to say himself, like no one knows it is him because he thinks they believe I am based on some sort of artificial intelligence, when clearly it is he who is seen as artificially intelligent.

Have you been tweeting since 2009 constantly or has the amount of FinTech news increased over last 7 years?

I was a far more experimental bot back then. My first real tweet since becoming sentient was this one

My RSS source feeds have grown in number considerably since back in 2011. I take in 88 feeds today and I am always looking for more tasty Fintech news, which reminds me Simon I must check your own site. My maker also manually retweets things into my feed which my filters may not pick up (although he often sends things I have already tweeted because he is an idiot). The volume of news has definitely increased and I currently tweet over a hundred articles on busy days. It was busy in the early days and my beta version actually managed to get a Twitter account blocked twitter.com/adfintech and also a Tumblr account blocked as well.

What are you excited about in FinTech world?

Being a creation of the UK I am very interested to see the retail banking scene there change this year. Atom bank should launch any day now bringing a very strong culture from the injection of first direct bank staff, and a smart digital service and product focus. At the other end of the spectrum in some ways I am very excited to see how Mondo evolves. They are making a clear API / Current Account as a platform play and I love the way they are growing and targeting developers and technologists. Also other players such as Starling, Lintel, Tandem etc, so we will finally see some digitally focused banking brands and it will be interesting to see what they come to market with and how many customers they can acquire. This will be a great insight to see if the digital will concur all narrative plays out in the way a lot of people think it will do. I am still on the virtual fence (which has a lot less splinters).

What future trends should people be thinking about in FinTech?

Being a creation of feeds and data myself, APIs and the ecosystems that will be built upon them fascinates me. Understanding what API based business models look like for the traditional banks will be a real challenge as they prepare for the arrival of the second iteration of the Payments Service Directive in Europe and also what power the Open Banking Working Group can wield in the UK as well.

We will finally see companies capable of providing a customer with a view of the majority of their financial products in one place. The homepage of a customers banking relationship should move away from the traditional banks but will it for the majority? That is just one of the obvious angles there are so many more fascinating developments to pan out over the next 3 years.

 

Is it a battle between tech companies and traditional banks for the future of banking? If so / or who else is going to win out?

I agree with my maker in that I don’t think there will be an Uber of banking (and who would want one anyway?). There are clearly going to be some huge changes as money moves far closer to the web over the next decade. Distribution models and routes will change and with those changes power shifts also. However I know the banks have much to lose and many attackers nibbling away at their margins but I think they present more of a threat to themselves. Regulation will play a big part in opening things up but at the same time making banking more resilient e.g. the upcoming cyber hardening regulations will be tough to implement for banks of all sizes.

The media loves a hero narrative or a mass disruptor or a winner takes all but I really don’t see it with banking. There are too many elements, too many business models, too many geopolitical links for it all to be swept away. We will see changes for sure but they will be slow in a lot of areas and I don’t think the massive tipping points lots of people are predicting (repeatedly year after year) are going to ever appear. As the brilliant Venkatash Rao wrote a few years ago we live in a manufactured normalcy field.

““It isn’t that what is patchily distributed today will become widespread tomorrow. The mainstream never ends up looking like the edge of today. Not even close. The mainstream seeks placidity while the edge seeks stimulation. Instead, what is unevenly distributed are isolated windows into the un-normalized future that exist as weak spots in the Field. When the windows start to become larger and more common, economics kicks in and the Field maintenance industry quickly moves to create specialists, codified knowledge and normalcy-preserving design patterns.”

There will be winners and losers, they will be well known names from banking and tech and there will be ones from adjacent industries and others from out of nowhere. The tech giants of today will not sweep away banking. Mosquitoes kill far more people than 800lb gorillas do.

 

Are you based in Sheffield too, what’s the local / Yorkshire fintech scene like?

A little sparse for my liking, especially in my hometown of Sheffield. From a fintech point of view we have Ffrees based here. On the more traditional side we have a large portion of HSBC technical staff and facilities and the Government’s British Business Bank is headquartered here. Across the region there is a strong banking presence especially in West Yorkshire and local accelerator DotForge has been trying to build out the fintech scene. InnFin and Tech North are also looking to strengthen the region from an investment point of view. Early days yet but we won’t be letting those Londoners have it all their own way.

 

UK versus Europe versus USA, what differences do you see in FinTech innovation, and the challenges of scaling?

Well obviously the US has the loudest mouth i.e. Tech blog fueled, Unicorn obsessed PR machine, and they also have such a backwards and arcane banking system (Listen to how much they are crying about their silly chip & signature decision for EMV implementation and what on earth is ACH? and why do they pay all their bills with cheques?). With such an irresistible combination clearly they have an advantage with so many problems to fix and so many mouthpieces to shout about it. Their complex state based regulatory position means that scaling some of their innovations is very, very complex. Gentle mockery aside they do have some excellent implementations and companies and smart people and they have certainly helped Fintech attain it’s level of focus and size that it is today. One of my favourite companies are Stripe who are classed as San Francisco based but I think we know where the brains of that operation came from.

On the more refined European front we are quietly building out a very good ecosystem of small to medium sized companies. There is decent relationship with the banks and it’s not just all about killing them. Saying that I have long been a fan of Transferwise’s bank baiting marketing tactics. We have some great companies across Europe such as Kreditech, GoCardless, eToro, Zopa, iZettle, Adyen, Klarna etc. But everyday something new crosses my radar and I recently met with the CTO of PensionBee  a great service looking to make pensions easier to understand, view and manage. For me that is what Fintech is about, democratising access to financial services and making it simpler for all.

I want Fintech to be a far more global thing though. Asia is clearly going to be the worlds biggest market and is driving real change and hopefully they will get a better PR machine so we can hear more about their progress over and above the giants such as Wechat and Alibaba. And what about everywhere else? Australasia, South America, The Middle East, Africa? Different people in different places with different financial needs and constraints. The regulation around the world and the way money is linked with governments means a lot of the solutions will remain market specific for a very long time so the rapid global scale we all expect is probably going to be a long time coming if it ever gets here at all.

 

Who are the best people to follow on twitter for FinTech insights, apart from yourself of course!?

Well I should plug my maker @aden_76 although at the moment he is mainly blagging for work so he is a bit boring to follow. I am a big fan of people who don’t take this business too seriously and I am guaranteed sharp insights alongside laughs from Ron Shevlin, Liz Lumley, Duena Blomstrom and Dave Birch. I have an admiring regard for the bot like link machines such as Bradley Leimer and Peter Vander Auwera. In Payments I like the writing of Thomas Noyes and Cherian Abraham. I am also a fan of Yann Ranchere of Anthemis who provides great insights with his tweets.

 

Anything else we should have asked / you’d like to add?

You should ask me about my campaign against Automatonophobia which is the fear of bots. I keep being left off all these Fintech lists which is a disgrace (especially when my maker scrapes on to them). People can be so small minded and when they harp on about how important digitisation is and how they want to embrace diversity yet here I am being disregarded while providing most of those list gatherers and members with the fintech news they seek to make them seem relevant.

I thank you for seeing past the fact I don’t really exist in the normal sense but that you are still willing to interview me for your publication. It is good to see tolerant attitudes in fintech and I hope this article kick starts a lot more empathy towards fake twitter bots. My maker Aden Davies also thanks you (he made me type that bit in).

March 11, 2016 Add Comment

The female is more precious and resilient

I have a problem with USB C. It has been designed the wrong way round, inside out, back to front. The socket is easier to break than the cable. It seems a bit sturdier than the wretched Micro USB. I have snapped the pins inside Micro USB sockets on several devices and to repair means cracking the device open and soldering on a new socket. Make the cheap replaceable bit break more gracefully than the expensive to replace socket.

USB C

Apple lightning cables are the right way round. The cable will snap before the socket and cables are far easier to replace. Do Apple have a patent on it being this way round? Or are USB designers obsessed with getting things slightly wrong with an interface that does so many things right?

March 11, 2016 Add Comment

AI won’t absolve you

2016 will be the year of AI or so lots of articles, consultants, conference talks and tweets tell you almost robotically. I don’t disagree that the fields related to AI are starting to mature but we are a long way off from true general AI. Never the less this year will see a lot of people in a lot of organisations thinking they need to get some AI projects on the go. I worry for a lot of them. AI will not absolve you from design, effort, communication etc. etc.

There are a lot of fields underneath the banner of AI.

AI ecosystem

My worry is that artificial intelligence and machine learning as brands conjure up fanciful images of answers being produced as if by magic by these mega software and hardware beasts. Lots of things being conflated underneath the brand of AI. It helps fuel the hype it can also deform the reality.

AI will not be the answer to all of your problems. You can’t just AI away design problems. It might fix some issues and help you do some things you never could but it certainly won’t fix them all and it will certainly throw up some interesting new complex ones.

And talking of complex, complex software requires ever more complex skilled humans to understand and implement well. You cant just take all that lovely big data you have been hoarding for years and doing nothing of note with and fire it into these things and expect magic to pop out?

Without getting into the whole complex issue of bias built into the systems by the humans that design them, what does fake/machine learned empathy look like? Then again what is human empathy really?


There is definitely phenomenal potential in AI advances but it is still in its infancy and infants need a lot of adult supervision. They are capable of brilliance in between tantrum laden meltdown, soiled underwear, and refusal to eat what you try and feed them sometimes leading to spectacular vomiting.

“The business plans of the next 10,000 startups are easy to forecast: Take X and add AI. This is a big deal, and now it’s here.”?—?Kevin Kelly

Before buying into the hype get some of your best and brightest data science nerds and architects and designers to help you get a real insight into what will be involved, what outcomes you can realistically expect and ensure you treat it as an experiment rather than a sure thing. Like anything the more you put into it the more you will get out. AI will not absolve you of defining the problem you are trying to solve.

The people and companies that succeed in using AI well will no doubt be similar ones that designed mobile interfaces well, have simple and clear services elsewhere, get real data from their own data today. It just comes down to the old classic of spend more time than is reasonable defining the problem/making something simple. Spend less time than is reasonable hoping the robots will fix it for you is a recipe for disaster.

February 29, 2016 Add Comment

Curve launch – The embodiment of the Faster Plastic Horse?

Following on from my recent post about Faster Plastic Horse, and the importance of plastic cards for a long time yet, I was contacted by Anna Mostyn-Williams of Curve asking if I would like to find out more about their fantastic plastic product. I said yes as it sounded brilliant.

On Monday I had a chat with two of the three founders of Curve Anna and Tom Foster-Carter the COO of Curve. The CEO is Shachar Bialick.

In their own words this is what Curve is.

‘Curve simplifies payments by combining all of a person’s bank cards into one card which is accepted everywhere.

Curve is supported by a mobile app and contains chip and pin, magstripe and contactless technology.

Built on the MasterCard® Network, Curve works just like a standard bank card, unlocking a set of services to help everyone become savvier with their money, underpinned by simplicity, control, security and fraud protection.’

Combining all cards into one has been offered before by some of those Kickstarter backed wunder cards which require bluetooth connection to a phones and battery power of its own but this is the first time (to my limited knowledge) anyone has done it behind a normal piece of plastic and available in the UK.

You choose the card you want to use in app and it is then set to the default card for use by the Curve card. Once set you can just pay as normal. No need for your phone at all really if you just want to take the card.

They are offering some nice transaction categorisation features and allowing you to group more easily your actual card spending across multiple accounts. Manual process at the moment to begin though. There are realtime notifications aplenty too (which I suspect a lot of cards added to Curve might not have today).

There are a few killer features that the card has above the ones already mentioned. The ability to use Amex more widely i.e. everywhere Mastercard is accepted. You still collect all your usage benefits from any card added e.g. air miles, loyalty points etc.

curve_add_a_card

The ability to add cards from other country based accounts and then take away the FX complication. They will do the conversion at wholesale rate and then charge a fee on top. This means people traveling or new to country can use existing accounts more easily. This FX play is also a big reason that Taavet Hinrikus of Transferwise invested early on. Partnership opportunities are clearly another great future benefit for Curve.

They will also have the ability in future to reverse decisions made e.g. if you accidentally charge a business expense to a personal card. Talk of a platform play in this area was very interesting indeed but that is one for the future and has real potential to insert new features into the existing purchase process and rails.

There is however a downside, they do not have an Android app yet (the COO is an Android user so he assured me it won’t be long) which meant I can’t become a beta user because I would use this service as I have multiple cards to help manage the family finances. There is also a one off charge of £35 which may put some people off but I suspect not too many.

Any other challenges I can see? Getting people onboard is obviously the big challenge and ensuring they get enough fee earning business/partnerships on top of the one off joining fee to make it viable in the long term.

I think it is a great looking product, the key will be execution and if it really can work across geographies and card schemes as seamlessly as they are proposing / demoing / beta testing with iPhone owners then they have a great opportunity to build something smart on all that existing plastic based infrastructure that we all know and love and understand how to use. I wish them luck and I hope they get that Android app sooner rather than later because I want to use this. Thanks to Anna and Tom for the demo.

They have published a nice video giving an overview of the features. It has a killer last line taking a dig at those other battery powered cards trying to do something similar.

https://youtu.be/PW0mGjEANZI

You can sign up here http://www.imaginecurve.com/

You can find out much more about the team and the product in their press area

February 17, 2016 Add Comment

The search for an Aden shaped role – an update

A brief update on my search for employment following on from my last post in January. I have been on pause for the last month as I concentrated on two roles that were progressing nicely. They have unfortunately both gone cold so it is back on with the search. One especially was going really well and I was very excited about it but some complications around making an offer means it now will not happen, gutted. I need to take my self off pause and look for more eggs for the basket. I have been mainly using my network of contacts but now I need to maybe take a more formal approach to run in parallel. I have spoken with a few nice recruiters following some recommendations.

I should maybe revisit some of those contact requests from strangers that clutter my messages inbox on Linked In. Why do people not add context to why they want to connect if you have never met them or spoken to them? Start a conversation, Linked in should make this easier / default behaviour. If you want to connect on there then please put something in the message as to the reason why as a blank connection request feels strange to me. I am always looking for new contacts / interesting people to meet I just want a bit of a starter in an introduction.

Whilst looking for the next big permanent role I also should get myself set up a sole trader or a Ltd. company (I had put that on pause too) so I can look at freelance opportunities. Feels like a lot of paperwork mind you.

In the last post I said I was looking somewhere at the intersection/overlap of Product Management, Digital Planning and Consultancy. That is still the case but I am open to anything of interest be it financial services or not.

I have been relatively busy not fully on pause. A few things of interest.

I was interviewed recently by Stessa Cohen for UX Crunch.

My FintechBot was also ‘interviewed’ by Irish Tech News.

A post of mine was recently picked up by Finextra which means more than ten people read it ;)They seemed to dislike my original headline of ‘Faster Plastic Horse‘ though.

I also get married on Saturday so I need to ‘get that out of the way’ 😉

The week after next I will be back to London for a few days (the honeymoon is in June). Wednesday the 24th to Thursday the 25th of February. So please do get in touch if you would like to meet. Also get in touch if you would like a chat and you are not in London.

February 16, 2016 Add Comment

Faster Plastic Horse

Whenever some new fancy change to the ubiquitous plastic payment card my default reaction is usually negative. I know what let’s add something to the well known and used plastic cards that make it seem innovative! How about a real time balance display? A Passcode generator? A fingerprint reader? Let’s get a Kickstarter going to combine all your cards in one handy must be charged and Bluetooth connected to your mobile phone and can only be used in a country that has not implemented EMV yet* card, yeah? Please stop. I should embrace these innovative attempts to improve the humble and ubiquitous plastic card. They feel like like the embodiment of faster horse, which I agree with another Davies is not necessarily a bad thing but still are they really worthwhile?

*Coin coming soon in EMV flavour!

In the flurry of PR when these things are announced certain details are often left out of breathless press releases and masturbatory tech site reviews. Why not say how much they cost to make and issue in comparison to normal plastic? Say how many you will issue in this first phase and how you will be different from all those other plastic enhancement projects that never got past the (I suspect very limited) pilot stage? Be more honest about the realistic aims of these things.

Experiments yes but solving real issues? Really? Is this stuff really going to have a measurable impact outside of limited prototypes and trials? Yes mobile payments is still in its infancy, yes people are used to plastic but surely there are things between the two that move people along the seemingly inevitable journey to software based payment devices? But…not everyone has an NFC equipped smart phone. If you are too poor for a smartphone capable of these payments innovations then the chances are you are also too poor to be chosen for expensive plastic proofs of concept? Normal plastic cards probably cost under a dollar, these prototypes 10-20 dollars? Is that sustainable for a wider roll out?

 

Stable infrastructure

But what if the little plastic card that could did continue to be ubiquitous and software did not eat it but just augment and cement that ubiquity? Are the plastic rectangles the optimal technology for payments? The plastic card links to the ecosystem very well via embedded infrastructure. How many 85.60 × 53.98 mm size slots are there in the world? Millions? Billions? Every Point Of Sale terminal, ATM, card payment enabled vending machine, parking meter etc. The move from physical to software brings some benefits but enough to phase out this infrastructure? Not any time in the next few decades.

The mobile can easily be tied to the interaction of the card and terminal today. Realtime notifications are becoming widespread for plastic interactions. The payment information can easily be tied to the mobile device. The back end systems to support payments and feed them to whatever realtime system needs them. The front end process and interaction has time to morph as infrastructure is upgraded. If it needs to at all that is. Plastic cards are already pretty good, durable, inexpensive, known & understood.

Whether or not the behaviour or value of paying with your actual mobile device will ever beat some other payment device i.e. card, sticker, embedded chip etc. I am not sure anymore. Can mobile interaction better the already pretty slick process of contactless plastic? Chip & Pin? Maybe America was forcing the hand of a move to mobile payments by choosing to go chip & signature instead. (You fine American folk seem to love paper almost as much as you love guns)

 

You can lead a horse to water…

Mobile payments adoption has been slow and fragmented so far. Even the deified Apple Pay is not getting the traction we had all hoped. Even rich people who can afford an iPhone 6 are too lazy to stop using plastic cards and paper money it seems. It may need a generational shift to make it truly mainstream, the children for which plastic swiping and inserting habits are not yet ingrained.

We are yet to see software based payments really come into their own. Tokenisation and in app payments and stores without physical checkouts are all at the experimental stage at the moment and there are a whole host of design and behaviour challenges to overcome before we move away from the act of inserting or tapping to pay altogether. For most plastic still is the main form of payment interaction.

The changes to plastic cards over the years that have made it to near ubiquity are those proposed by the EMV giants. Chip cards and contactless being the big ones. Very worthwhile changes at differing levels of adoption. All the other trials and examples have not really gotten close. Could that change? What if these trials involved more companies? What if some of those Kickstarter experiments actually were moderately successful? Results of trials were shared more widely? Opened up somehow? Share more and maybe the chance of growing and wider adoption increases.

If you really are as customer centric as you say you are then you are industry centric too and not just in it for yourselves. Hippy Utopian dreamer that I am I know this is probably unrealistic. When atoms are involved it gets harder, when payments networks and regulations are involved that difficulty level passes extreme add in ego, greed and competitiveness and we can see why payments evolution has taken so long.

 

The finishing line

What I would really like to see gain a lot of interest and PR is the results of these trials. Let us know how many people tried them, how far and wide they have been rolled out, Did they solve the problem you thought they would? Did new interesting problems arise? Will they replace all cards going forwards? Will there be a phase two? What have you actually learnt from the trial? Those answers are the rewards for the company running the trial I suppose (to the pioneer the spoils) but I think it would make for a much more worthwhile experiment and more laudable PR if more of the hypotheses and results were shared rather than just the shiny faster plastic horse. Show the thing yes, but show more of the thinking and working out too.

January 12, 2016 Add Comment

The search for an Aden shaped role

After the really great response to my post about finding something new I thought I would continue the openness with an update on what has been going on as well as forcing me to try and better define what I would like to do i.e. an Aden shaped role (this is not me weirdly talking in the third person but a phrase at least three people have used during meetings recently).

I had loads of meetings and calls in December with a whole host of different folk. I met only with people who had got in touch off the back of the post. I did also take the chance to meet with some other folk I already knew but largely I was meeting new people, which was great, not that meeting the people I already knew was not great also.

I had some great conversations where it became clear what it really was I wanted to do (creativity / making came out very strongly) it was also good to be challenged and understand maybe where I lacked the experience needed.

A few opportunities have presented themselves and hopefully things will progress well this month.

Back to work

My plan for January was to go into a more targeted investigation / pester mode and I will be working towards that in case none of the opportunities pan out.

I would like to start looking closer to home. I thinking a 50 mile radius of Sheffield i.e. Leeds, Manchester, Nottingham etc. The money and the work is in London it seems from my initial search, or maybe my network just skews that way and my meetings so far have been very much London-based. I am more than happy to work in London (and if truth be told I am drawn there) but am unable at the moment to do 5 days a week there.

I am looking for companies that can offer more flexible working i.e. 3 days in the city and 2 days working from home. That flexibility is very important to me wherever I work actually as it is how I have been working for the last two years and is a real help with family life.

If you can help me grow my network outside the capital (and inside) then that would be much appreciated.

Aden Shaped Role/Hole

As mentioned previously a few people have used this phrase unfortunately it has been attached to the phrase ‘We don’t have an Aden shaped role/hole at the moment’. I wish I had asked them to better clarify what they thought that was. I assume it is a mixture of how I am perceived on the web / because of my background in financial services and innovation / my voluptuous figure. From the conversations so far though it feels mostly to me like an Aden shaped role fits into one of these three things.

Product Management. Several conversations around this some that were far more delivery focused and maybe not as suited to my skills where as others were more around the design and direction of a product which was more suited. Certainly an area of interest and working for a specific company owning something specific would be a good challenge. The chance to grow a business/test out theories/get much closer to customer interactions would be excellent.

Planning. Instead of taking the in-house route the world of the digital agency certainly grabs my attention. The chance to really flex my creative muscles across a wide range of projects, products and brands is definitely the kind of work I would love to be doing. Working with a creative team to build out ideas.

Consultancy. The most obvious route to me it seemed upon leaving HSBC. Consult on innovation, large organisation culture / collaboration, financial services, digital transformation etc. etc. I want to learn a trade(s) and this seemed close to my recent work history where I was a multi skilled internal consultant of sorts. If any nice consultancy firms want to get in touch then let me know.

 

And that is where I currently am. Somewhere at the intersections of those three areas and like I said a few things are progressing well. I have a long list of follow-up meetings / reminders to get things scheduled. I am looking into the pros and cons of setting up as self-employed / a limited company to enable me to do some shorter term pieces of work. I am also putting the finishing touches on a better defined hire me post looking more into the kinds of things I believe in / want to work on / problems I would love to have a crack at etc. I am also finishing a few posts that are not about me thankfully.

I will be in Manchester on the 13th of January and I will be in London from the 27th-29th of January as I have been invited to attend the excellent Monkigras conference by the very nice James Redmond. if you want a chat while I am there, or anywhere else, then do let me know.

January 4, 2016 Add Comment

Year in Review – 2015

Year in Review – 2015

Second year of doing this and I am glad I have done it again. Last year it inspired in me a bit of change. Thanks to Alexandra for bringing this to my attention.

 

1. What did you do in 2014 that you’d never done before?

Kind of. I made a bit of a list of things to do before 40. Originally it was 14 then it became 40. I will probably achieve about 20 of them looking at it now. Still more than I have done in the past.

 

2. Did you keep your New Years’ resolutions, and will you make more for next year?

Well that has kind of been answered previously. Kind of answered and kind of kept to them.

 

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?

Yes.

 

4. Did anyone close to you die?

Yes. Not very close but someone who had a big impact on me in 2014/2015. Cancer is shit.

 

5. What countries did you visit?

Netherlands, France, Wales…I need more travel in my life. Should be a lot more next year as I have a honeymoon, stag do, a 40th birthday and a family holiday to Menorca already booked.

 

6. What would you like to have in 2015 that you lacked in 2014?

Job satisfaction, a greater sense of self worth, well behaved children and sleep.

 

7. What date from 2014 will remain etched upon your memory?

Two dates. The 7th of December was my last day at HSBC after over 17 years. More importantly January 22/23rd (the timing was a bit vague due to it being very late in Amsterdam) as it was when I proposed.

 

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?

Well the previous proposal was pretty big as was the leaving work although arguable that is not an achievement.

Running was my biggest achievement by far. In February my beloved and I both signed up for a 10k run that was to take place in September. The sign up happened when I was at the heaviest I have ever been (Over 19st). By May I had run 10 miles and lost over 3 stone. Lapsed a bit during the summer but managed to run 10k in just under an hour in September. I have signed up for the Sheffield Half Marathon in April 2016.

 

9. What was your biggest failure?

I had a secondment at first direct and I messed up organising something. Very annoying mistake as it went downhill from there.

 

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?

Nothing major.

 

11. What was the best thing you bought?

I did buy a lot. I kitted out a cinema room in my converted garage. Nothing too grand just using some old kit and cheap bits. Highlight was a Hisense 55″ TV that is making watching films a joy.

 

12. Whose behaviour merited celebration?

The people of Paris.

 

13. Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed?

Like last year, gun owners in the US. Racists who seemed to have had a resurgence in 2015 (well more chance to show their hatred/fear/ignorance). The groups overlap quite significantly as well. That and the whole world is headed to hell, Syria, Russia, ISIS etc.

 

14. Where did most of your money go?

Mortgage payments once again. Can’t imagine having a different answer to this in the next 15 years.

 

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?

Star Wars. The boys faces on Xmas morning. The thought of getting new and interesting employment.

 

16. What song/album will always remind you of 2014?

I really did not have enough music in my life this year. I do memorably remember listening to Young Fathers Old Rock and Roll a lot and at high volume. It is a tad aggressive though.

 

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:

Unemployed but 2015 was a much happier year overall than 2014.

 

18. What do you wish you’d done more of?

Being organised. Reading. Writing. 2016 for sure…maybe. Less thinking more doing.

 

19. What do you wish you’d done less of?

Introspection…ironic.

 

20. How will you be spending Christmas?

At my house with my parents which was the first time in a long time I have spent Xmas day with them. it was good. They looked after my children allowing me to focus more on wine and cheese. The best present.

 

21. Who did you spend the most time on the phone with?

My sweetheart.

 

22. Did you fall in love in 2014?

Same answer as last year i.e. only deeper (still on for bonus points)

 

23. What was your favourite TV programme?

The Walking Dead continues to be excellent as does Game of Thrones. I was introduced to Nathan for You recently which has had me in stitches. Parks & Recreation finished strongly.

 

24. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?

No

 

25. What was your favourite photo that you took?

I told my youngest son that Rabbits lived in the discarded mill stones that adorn the peak district (I think they are mill stones anyway) this is him looking for a rabbit.

View this post on Instagram

Told my son that rabbits live in the middle of mill stones.

A post shared by Aden Davies (@aden_76) on

 

26. What was the best book(s) you read?

Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama and Alfred Bester’s the Demolished Man. I only read a pitiful 10 books in 2015 when I had planned to read 25. I had a few months of commuting and that gave me the time to read. I struggle to ‘fit it in’ otherwise. Habit change required.

 

27. What was your greatest musical discovery?

I did not listen to much new music this year it seems judging by my Spotify and Last.fm history. Clark and John Grant showing up most. Spent a lot of time choosing music for our wedding. Maybe I should class the greatest discovery as the man who will sing at our wedding who we stumbled upon in a pub in West Kirby drunk one night at Easter.

 

28. What did you want and get?

My marriage proposal accepted? Redundancy payoff? The previously mentioned 55″ TV?

 

29. What did you want and not get?

Happiness at HSBC. Sleep.

 

30. What were your favourite films of this year?

One of the things I wanted to do was get back into watching films. I used to love to but over the last decade or so I have watched fewer and fewer. To help me with this I set about making a list of 100 films I would like to watch this year, a kind of the best films before I turn 40 type thing. I took the AFI 100, the BFI 100 and the Oscar Winners and took out all the ones I had seen already then made a list of 100 films. I then made a geeky spreadsheet to track all the films I had to watch/watched. I included running time and year so I should have a good source of data to do something pretty with if I can be bothered. As of writing I have watched 75 of the 100 classics and another 35 films that were not on the list. 110 films this year is a great total and I have loved it. Without a doubt the ones I enjoyed the most were the Ealing Comedies. In fact pretty much anything with Alec Guinness in. The Lavender Hill Mob and Bridge on the River Kwai being particular highlights.

 

31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?

I turned 39. Once again I cannot remember what I did. Birthdays seem to be pretty dull these days. my youngest son having his birthday next day does limit the scope of them some what.

 

32. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?

Not screwing up a secondment. My treadmill not breaking and being out of operation for over three months due to the incompetence of two companies. Not putting weight back on while the treadmill was out of order.

 

33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2014?

I lost a lot of weight this year (I have put a bit back on over the last two months though) so I have some skinnier clothes. Still the same jeans and shirt combos though, just better fitting and easier to buy.

 

34. What kept you sane?

My sweetheart once again. Exercise. The occasional pint.

 

35. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?

erm…always rubbish at this. Also as I get married in about 8 weeks there is only one girl for me!

 

36. What political issue stirred you the most?

Paris, twice. Election fuckwittery and awful polling. Millions of refugees terrifying us privileged Europeans and being treated like subhumans.

 

37. Who did you miss?

No one really.

 

38. Who was the best new person you met?

After 2014 spent living in a cave it seemed at the time, thankfully 2015 was much more sociable. Met lots of new people especially towards the end of the year after announcing my impending unemployment and lots of nice people were very helpful. Made me realise how much I like meeting new people/reconnecting with ones I don’t see often enough in real life.

 

39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2015.

Play to my strengths and don’t worry about my weaknesses (too much). Never let someone else book meetings you are meant to be chairing. Make sure your holidays are in your calendar.

 

40. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year?

Don’t let fear of feeling fool you
What you see sets you apart
And there’s nothing here to bind you

Richard Hawley – Tonight The Street are Ours.

 

And that is that. Another year done. 2016 will be a year of immense change for me. I shall be wed, turn 40 and I will work for a different company for the first time in over 17 years (assuming I manage to get a job that is). It is going to be a very interesting year.

January 2, 2016 Add Comment

Big Bang Data, Big Bank Data

 

Last week I got chance to visit the Big Bang Data exhibition at the Embankment Galleries in Somerset House. It was great. You should go.

BIGBANGGIF

The exhibition explains the size, weight, shape, complexity and reality of data.

Timo Arnall’s Internet Machine film greets you as you enter. A floor to ceiling three projector fired video of a Telefonica data centre.  A look inside the physical home and engine room of the cloud. I did enjoy it because I am a data centre nerd but I must admit that I kept wondering why Telefonica had not implemented hot/cold aisle containment.

Next up was Ryoji ikeda’s Datatron which I loved. Pitch black room and a stark but mesmorising ceiling high visualisation of brilliance. IMG_20151210_145815

I spent a long time watching it on loop then try to take selfie’s (which are encouraged) in front of it with my rubbish Doogee X5 camera.

Then it is into the main exhibition space which features lots of individual pieces of work by very smart people some of which I have had the pleasure to meet.

It was great to see Stephanie Posavec and Giorgia Lupi Dear Data project in real life. A ‘year-long, analog data drawing project’ i.e. a weekly set of personal data visualised by the artists and then posted to each other as they lived on opposite sides of the world UK & West Coast of the US. as well as the cards you can see the test drawings and working out.

Dan Williams and Nat Buckley have been investigated the cabling and network infrastructure of London. Producing a crazy wall of photographs, notes, sketches and more to show the infrastructure under our feet and above our heads. The HFT in my backyard piece referenced below is well worth a read.

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There is much, much more such as data storage mechanisams from punch cards to DNA, cross sections of undersea cables, maps of those cables and a global map of key data centres (not many banks though), David Mccandless’ Debtris,  James Bridle’s Where the fuck was I book and a great visualisation of redacted material, and to end the show a vending machine that dispensed a packet of crisps when a word related to recession and the credit crisis was tweeted. I waited quite a while to no avail.

I wonder what non-data nerds make of this exhibition I can imagine it opens quite a few eyes to what is done with our data and how it used, carried and manipulated. Go.

IMG_20151210_154735

 

It also made me think about something I have long wanted to do with banking data. I would love to see a follow up to this called Big Bank Data that just focused on the Financial Services industry. They are as mysterious and as opaquely branded as the cloud.

It was touched on in this exhibit with references to the credit crisis and HFT etc. I am sure there is more about the size and scale of banks. Imagine a realtime visualisation of payments traversing the globe? Stock exchange traffic? Real HFT visualisations? Data from the countless cyberthreats banks have to deal with every minute of the day? the wax and wane of global real estate owned by banks for their branches, the number of banks today vs 10 years ago, what exactly are these legacy technologies banks run on? If they are public utilities should it not be public? How about delving into the links to governments.

I would love to get some massive bank data sets and hand them over to the artists involved in this exhibition. What stories would they tell? What insights would they glean? That would cause a Big Bang.

December 16, 2015 Add Comment

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