Large, Risk-Averse Financial Companies Can Still Innovate

Some industries are all about innovation. Others, like banking, need to be, and desperately want to be, but have inbred obstacles to overcome.

So it was no surprise that 50-odd bankers applauded thunderously when Luis Solis said: "I'm not going to mention Apple, Google or Facebook as an example of what you should do in financial services."

It's ok to be uncool — you can still be innovative.

Solis, who runs the consulting firm imaginatik, sports a hipster's soul patch, but no question, he feels bankers' pain. Lecturing to them this month at the 45th-floor Times Square office of the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, Solis was encouraging, more than anything, while also cognizant of the difficulties bankers face when contemplating the development of new products.

And those difficulties are legion: management is focused on quarterly earnings; marketing departments are focus-group myopic, relying on untimely snapshots of customer preferences in a Twitter-fast world; employees are rewarded for avoiding risk (except, perhaps, on certain trading floors), just to name some.

But Solis, whose firm provides "innovation management" services to large companies including Capital One (COF), says there are ways for such mature businesses to become disruptors without disrupting their own vital operations.

The most important thing, he says, is that financial institutions should check their risk tolerance — managers should ask "to what extent can I fail and it's okay?" (He quickly clarified that he was not referring to activities that can bust a firm, like rogue trading.)

"If you don't fail, you'll become the best typewriter company in the world."

An innovation-minded company should create "a measurable, sustainable, intentional process" for incubating new ideas, and start a portfolio of different projects, Solis said. It must dedicate resources to these endeavors — not just money but people and their time.

This does not mean funding ideas willy-nilly. Innovation goes well beyond doing "cool stuff," Solis said. It is about "more than being clever." There must be a business purpose, a valid reason to bring something to market. Innovation, he said, is best defined as "putting ideas into valuable action."

The subtext of Solis' presentation was that Swift, the organization that hired him to speak, is doing all the right things, through an initiative called Innotribe. Solis in fact was followed by Kosta Peric, a 22-year veteran of Swift who founded that effort.

Peric, an affable man with salt-and-pepper hair and a cherubic smile, had worked in every part of Swift except human resources when, five years ago, he was appointed the organization's first head of innovation, a title that would appear to carry terrifyingly high expectations.

He told the audience members that there are probably potential "intrapreneurs" working in their companies. "Contrary to what you may think, they're not extroverts. They tend to be a little shy." Companies need to "fetch them, push them to come forward with their ideas."

Peric likened a longstanding business to a castle — the people working inside are interested in preserving and optimizing what they have, and the more disruptive an idea is, the less likely they are to welcome it. This hesitancy is understandable and appropriate, he said — at Swift, which transmits 18 million messages around the world a day on average, "failure is not an option" is the mantra.