Stephanie Hammes-Betti is Senior Vice President of Innovation Design for U.S. Bank. 

She describes her work as the front end of innovation, looking for new ideas to bring to the bank to evaluate. 

U.S. Bank has had innovation programs for 10 years, with seven groups focused on innovation: 

1. R&D

2. AI

3. Product Development

4. Emerging Payments and Technologies

5. Project Management

6. Payments Industry Liaison

7. Hammes-Betti’s group, Innovation Design, which provides innovation education, training, program design, and digital innovation initiatives to the enterprise and supports a lean start-up center of excellence

U.S. Bank is engaging employees throughout the bank in innovation. For example, can you tell me about your Innovator-in-Residence program? 

It’s for employees to come in for a six-week or 12-week program where they learn how to take an idea, validate it, improve it and ultimately pitch it – anywhere from 10 hours over five days, 40 hours over 10 weeks, or 80 hours over eight weeks. 

We also have what we call the IdeaPlace, where employees can come in and do sponsored challenges around things we are trying to solve. It’s crowdsourcing, in a really agile and lean way. 

We have an online platform on our intranet where we try to focus on a specific area, such as onboarding new customers, or we take an open approach to ask employees what ideas they may have been thinking about. 

We are looking to get some ideas, inspire others to comment on those ideas, and at the same time business lines can see what ideas are coming in.

This sounds as if it could be chaotic.

We try to keep focused. The platform is open to anyone in the company, so the number participating can be from 50 to 600 or 700 depending on the topic. Very often a couple thousand people might actually look at it, while the number ready to engage is probably lower.

How do you go from an idea to something that works in the real world?

If it’s retail banking, we engage with the branches. We will either take an idea to a branch and get feedback or test an idea in a branch. At that point, we don’t worry about scale. It may be just a kernel of an idea, but how would it scale? Often you sit at your desk and think of an idea, and then you go to show it to others and realize you didn’t learn about the needs of a branch staff or customers. 

How do you experiment?

We do it all: one-way mirrors, a customer experience studio, we have a lab — we try to see how different devices work with people, how they respond to different designs, how they interact with a screen. 

I live in Minneapolis, and we have skyways, so I can go out and talk to people in the skyways about how they see things.

“IN THE PAST, PEOPLE AT THE BANK WERE RELUCTANT TO TAKE THINGS THAT WEREN’T FINISHED TO PRESENT TO CUSTOMERS, BUT WE HAVE LEARNT CUSTOMERS LOVE TO PARTICIPATE. THEY ARE WILLING TO SHARE THEIR IDEAS, AND THEY LIKE TO WEIGH IN ON SOMETHING THEY MIGHT USE IN THE FUTURE.” 

Is it hard to get direct feedback from customers?

No, that’s really changed. In the past, people at the bank were reluctant to take things that weren’t finished to present to customers, but we have learned customers love to participate. They are willing to share their ideas, and they like to weigh in on something they might use in the future.

Have you seen any major shifts in the way innovation is working?

Customer focus. The biggest breakthrough is that customer focus is core. No longer are you just pushing the product and assuming people will use it because you created it. And that’s where knowledge of your customer helps. The better experience for them, the better the product.

As innovators, who is your competition?

The nonbank digital and app experiences our customers have experience with. A lot of innovation happens not just on the tech side, but solving a real customer problem and giving them an experience they didn’t expect, such as an app that serves up the answer and doesn’t require them to go hunt it down. 

We want to eliminate friction and create delight, and that is all through design. Everyone can have an app or a mobile device, but where you differentiate is around the customer experience.

What are the impacts on innovation from COVID-19?

It’s too soon to tell, but every day we are listening. 

Right now the focus is on supporting the immediate need and how we can help, but the longer this goes and the more impacts we see around this industry, some of that will evolve. 

We are trying to pay attention to the true needs, what may matter to certain groups of people — those who are sick, out of school, have seen impact on their jobs...

Let’s keep learning; we have put together thoughts about how to listen better: social media, customers’ service calls, articles we’re reading. Many people are sharing their experiences now, so we can learn from their stories.