Product Innovation
Client: LARGE FINTECH
Role: Executive Creative Director
Year: 2021
Project Duration: 10 weeks
The Ask
The investor communication’s business is relatively stable. Publishing and distributing documents such as proxy voting materials, prospectuses and investor reports are required by regulations. But these documents are not inherently engaging, so the risk from a disruption is high. Our client asked us to ideate, concept and test a new communications platform to see if there is a market need.
Concept Value Proposition
A tool that brings investors and advisors closer together, facilitating communication and building trust through insight into each others thoughts and interests, sharing tasks, traceability of documentation, and overall ease of use.
Evaluating the concept
We broke the evaluation into 2 stage gates to test whether or not there was a real market opportunity. Because our client was a fintech company, they were hoping to build a white-labeled solution that they could market to their broker clients. Therefore we had to prove that end-users (investors and advisors) would find it desirable, and if so, that clients (brokerages) would agree.
Stage Gate 1: End users
11 Investors
8 Advisors
32 Hours of Interviews
Stage Gate 2: Broker Clients
12 Broker Executives
8 Firms
9 Hours of Interviews
We showed participants different prototypes (depending on their roles): a mobile experience for investors, and a desktop view for advisors
Stage Gate 1: Reasons to Believe
Our Stage Gate 1 Research yielded promising end user interest. Both investors and advisors saw in a tool that would augment their current relationship, giving them a platform to communicate in a new, and more actionable way.
Stage Gate 2: A pivot
While we had positive signals from end users, brokers were a different story. Smaller boutique firms showed real interest as this represented a a valuable tool they could offer their clients. Larger firms also saw value in the different features but were more reticent to have a third party build their customer experience. This meant that although we had a good idea, there wasn’t a ready market for it.
We presented our clients with some potential paths for how to take these learnings and chart a path forward:
Though we didn’t get the final validation that we hoped for, we help chart a path and find ways to integrate with the flagship product.
Final Thoughts
It’s not easy to put your energy into something and find out it won’t work the way you want it to. It’s even harder to guide a client through that process. However, by using sound methodologies, and bringing everyone along for the journey, you can create value anyways.
We would have loved to build a new platform, but we still managed to get great insights, and find a way to bring them to market.
For more information about this or any other case study on this site, please contact me at daniel.holtzman@gmail.com