AI for Financial Services
the business Challenge
As part of an investment bank’s new innovation hub, our team was eager to demonstrate the potential of new technologies, including Generative AI, while introducing the value of iterative product development at the same time.
OUr Design challenge
Building a useful, trusted and completely cutting-edge tool
My role
Lead Designer
Timeline
4 months
The Team
Build Team: 2 product managers, 5 data scientists, 1 FE engineers
Project Sponsor: Head of Investment Banking
Activities and Deliverables
In-depth research into the business and bankers’ needs culminating in a comprehensive journey map; wireframes and scenario planning for an AI-powered conversation agent, usability testing, iterative visual designs.
an ecosystem of goals
An innovative technology, deeply rooted in Bankers’ daily work: Discovery shows where (and where not) to go deeper
INSIGHT: pitches are a place to start
Through interviews with bankers and operations directors we identified a place to apply this technology: presentations to potential clients, “pitches”. First, the organization had a strong library of past pitches to pull from to train a custom LLM. Secondly, if we were able to help bankers more pitches faster, that would mean more new business for the bank and increase revenue.
INSIGHT: finding is more helpful than making
Research showed Bankers were not yet ready or interested in having materials generated on their behalf. As a rule, Bankers will never put something in front of a potential client they don’t know inside and out. Maintaining trust was especially important considering this would be many people’s first introduction to Generative AI in a professional setting. Making a good first impression was essential.
Helping bankers build compelling narratives faster
As we dug further into learning how pitches were put together, we found that often Bankers would use past pitches as a jumping off point but past pitches, while retained by the bank were not centrally located or easily searched. We worked on a tool to enable Bankers to find past pitches faster.
am ambitious vision for the future
Scaling an intelligent platform to greater reach and impact
In addition to a tool to help in the short term, our stakeholders were interested to see ideas of how this tool might grow over time into something that Bankers could refer to and rely on throughout the day. Our research showed that Bankers often need to “get smart quickly”, the ability to stay up to speed across a wide portfolio of relationships would be very valuable to our users. As a result, we expanded our vision of what this product could, thinking of a Banker’s schedule of appointments as a foundation for potential prompts.
Impact / Outcomes
How an initial kickstart set off a powerful pattern of collaboration and innovation
This tool was successfully rolled out throughout the organization to subset of 130 Investment Bankers who used it in the process of putting together 40+ pitches. 80% of people who used the tool agreed that using the tool simplified and or streamlined the process of preparing pitches. Additionally impactful, our project made the Bank’s leadership familiar with human-centered design product development techniques. After the successful release of this product, we introduced a quarterly UX workshop series with leaders of the investment bank to identify opportunities for further technological investment.