Fueling the Future of Investing

The Challenge

Designing and facilitating an in-person ideation session to inspire a 2-5 year innovation roadmap for a leading financial services company.

Our client, a leading financial services company, had identified a promising new audience and wanted to create a roadmap for building engagement with them. To do so, we needed to do more than just create a profile of this emerging segment. We needed to help the team build the kind of empathy that would enable them to foresee the future of investing and design user-led investment solutions that would differentiate our client in the market.

The Approach

We first immersed ourselves in our client’s existing research to ensure we were starting from the same foundation of insight, before building a robust agenda for an in-person empathy and co-creation workshop at our client’s offices in Boston. At the workshop, we brought cross-functional teams together with real investors from the Emerging Segment, so associates could hear first hand about their journey, motivations, barriers and needs around investing. Through a series of creative convergent thinking exercises, associates and investors brainstormed solutions that could drive greater investment in the future, coming up with over 100+ future proofed ideas which were later prioritized.

The Impact

Our in-person workshop created internal alignment around how meaningful financial innovation should look and feel like for this audience — future-fitting, emotionally relevant, and intuitive. The event empowered stakeholders with a shared lens for what a good investing platform looks like, and established a pipeline of platformable concepts that bridge today’s emerging segment with tomorrow’s growth.