By Justin Arbuckle
“Responsible innovation” is a phrase we’re hearing a lot in digital banking, but what it describes isn’t new at all. It’s what we’ve been doing all along as we continue a digital transformation that’s defined, almost daily, by new products and ways of doing things.
Innovation is about finding solutions to problems. Responsible innovation takes that further, into thinking about the end user at every stage of the process, building safeguards into all our technology that protects customers’ data and privacy, and reflecting how they live their lives day to day.
In the ‘90s and into the 2000s, innovation meant “disruption.” Corporate leaders used to say, “We need to behave like Nokia,” a company that was founded in Finland in the 1860s and spent decades as a pulp and paper manufacturer, and then reinvented itself as a telecommunications company in the 1990s. Many of us remember Nokia cell phones – they were the iPhone of their day.
At that time, companies bought into the model of innovation teams as an add-on to their existing way of doing things. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that approach, but making innovation the job of just one team can lead down some very big, and very expensive, blind alleys.
Instead, responsible innovation builds change into the fabric of how we do things every day, across the whole organization. It’s about solving problems that customers don’t necessarily even see, even though their lives would be made easier with the problem solved. Some of those innovations will have a massive impact. Some won’t. But taking an organization-wide approach is better because the history of innovation in banking tells us that it’s very difficult to enforce or plan innovation. Instead, you innovate everywhere and then invest in the ideas that take off.
That brings me to the social and personal components of responsible innovation – how it’s really a commitment to making people’s lives better, no matter where they are. After all, our customers are all on different journeys and live and work in very different markets. Serving customers in such diverse markets is a huge opportunity, and it’s also a major responsibility — especially in how we manage and protect customer data.
Protecting that data is essential to building and maintaining trust with our customers. For instance, our cloud data is protected by security technology. Even in the highly unlikely event that someone was able to access that data, it would be in a format that is unusable for them. We call that technology “tokenization.” It allows us to work with the data – which is essential to so much of our work on the digital team – and at the same time protect the privacy of our individual customers.
It also allows us to safely share some of our development work, especially the work we do through the Plato platform, with organizations outside of the bank (Plato is a new, cloud-based development platform used by all of Scotia’s digital teams). It gives our developers higher profile in the industry, and it gives something back to the larger software development community.
We need to allow our people time to work on creative and innovative solutions to problems. We also have a responsibility to develop our staff by helping them find new skills and talents. You can’t just let someone solve the same kinds of problems for 20 years and expect them to grow. You help them by finding new ways to meet customer needs every day, and rising to the challenge. It’s about trying small experiments and seeing if they work, and then investing in them when they do.
Our eHome app is a great example. It began with a question – can we build an app that lets our customers apply for and get a mortgage entirely online? The answer to that question is eHome, the first end-to-end online mortgage application and management tool in the Canadian market.
We live in a hyper-connected world. It’s our job as digital bankers – and that’s all of us, as responsible innovators across the bank – to help our customers not just survive in that world, but to thrive in it. And because people are living more of their lives online, digital is the best entry point we’ve ever had for interacting with customers. We need to keep seizing on the opportunity it presents to engage with them, whatever stage they’re at in their journey, in a way that’s helpful, respectful and meaningful to them.
That’s the definition of responsible innovation — and we’re living it every day.
Justin Arbuckle is Senior Vice President, The Platform Organization, at Scotiabank
