Hear why putting people—consumers, customers and employees—at the center of innovation is what sets businesses apart. Sawhney will also dive into the critical components of a winning strategy—from research and insights to the need for speed and partnership.
Transcript:
IVR (00:11):
At MasterCard, we are focused on a world beyond the card as we know it beyond payments as we know them beyond the digital divide. Because at MasterCard we are focused on where the world is going next towards safer and even more secure digital transactions where contactless technology is within the reach of everyone and money moves effortlessly in real time across borders where buy now pay later plans, give people more choice and flexibility and multiple payment options, make new choices possible where fraud and security concerns are reduced and every transaction can be trusted. Where we leverage our technology leadership to develop digital-first data-driven innovations and enable new networks beyond payments and where people everywhere connect to the priceless possibilities in life. At MasterCard, we are creating this world right now and we are creating this world not for a few, but for all because our focus as always is on improving people's lives, on working side by side with our partners to deliver game-changing capabilities and on building one of the world's most admired brands. At MasterCard, we are focused on a world beyond and on all the people who live there because that's a world that's truly priceless.
Bunita Sawhney (02:05):
Good afternoon. My name's Bunita Sawhney and I represent MasterCard and our partnerships with US financial institutions across community institutions and credit unions, as well as some of the largest institutions. Many of I see you here represented in the room, and it's my honor to be here today. My job is to help ensure that we meet everyone's expectations and hopefully exceed them. Starting first with our customers in providing you technology and seamless solutions to reach your consumers as well as to ensure that we're giving customers and consumers new experiences that take friction out of the system, bring innovation to our daily lives, but also help ensure that each and every transaction is safe and secure. And I heard a little bit about that dialogue earlier today. So great panels already. I sit in a really unique position in our organization because I get the benefit of two distinct and important vantage points. First, from an outside perspective, I get the opportunity to work with financial institutions and help ensure that we help deepen relationships with card holders and consumers. And inside the organization I have the benefit of being able to help realize new technology, to help make consumers' lives easier, More efficient, safer, and hopefully more fun. So what I know is this, when we bring these two vantage points together, that is truly where the magic happens. When we get the opportunity to bring consumer and customer needs in the heart of our process, we get to benefit from brighter and clearer and smarter innovations. MasterCard operates in over 210 countries around the world, and that scale gives us the opportunity to think clearly and listen and meet local market needs, but also to bubble that information up and find the themes, the macro trends, we're going to talk about some of those today, and it allows us to make sure that we identify commonalities and also the differences that affect different cultures, communities, countries, and generations. And so it is with the deepest understanding of audiences, we're going to talk a lot about audiences, our customers, consumers, and even our employees that we think about putting our relentless dedication of bringing these constituents into the center and ensuring that we're able to deliver leading technology that makes things easier and better. So let's start for a moment and talk about human-centric design. That's the foundation of this conversation, and so we're going to take a moment to define it, right? We have it laid out here for us at MasterCard. It's a problem solving technique. We are using this problem solving technique to ensure that we can bring the people right into the center of the process, design products and solutions that meet real, that resonate and meet real expectations and solve for real pain points and problems. It's a strategy that is based on empathy, understanding, and innovation. And what we know is that our audiences are evolving quickly, so quickly that we have to work hard to keep up with pace. One, the generations that we're working with now, many of them are digital native two, some of them have lost faith in governments, for example, and they're looking more and more to corporations such as yourselves to help lean in on societal issues. And they're expecting us to take a stand. Entrepreneurs, they're innovators, they're dreamers, they are creators, they are conveners. And this is a generation who isn't going to just accept the status quo. In fact, they're prepared to do something about it and they certainly expect that we will too. So we believe firmly in the power of human-centric design. We use it each and every day. And I'm going to give you some very clear examples of how we brought this process to life and the outcomes that have come that are fueling new innovations across our ecosystem. And what we've learned so far is that when we bring these new innovations, we are able to design products that are more efficient, more effective, more user friendly. What's more, when we do this process, we're able to deepen our relationships with our customers and with our consumers. And those are trust building activities, right? They allow us to align on our values. And what that means is we're bringing humanity to innovation. And when we do this, we can make a greater impact in our communities. So let me take us forward and we're going to start with, well, how the heck do we do this? It starts first and foremost with research. Of course. How can we understand consumers and constituents if we don't talk to them and listen? And we use many of the traditional techniques that I'm sure each of us do here in the room. We use focus groups, we use surveys, but we're also using the latest techniques and trying and learning from them, including generative gamified questions. We're using new qualitative digital innovations that allow us to do live online co-creation sessions, mind mapping, emotion solicitation, and we even test with social experimentation and we bring neuroscientists and psychologists to the table to help us get it right. And we know that when we do this, the outcome is priceless. Why? Because we know that we are able to be more effective and be more relevant. So I'm going to share with you one example of a process that we use, and then I'm going to show you some outcomes that have come from the process. But we lead in our co-creation and innovation sessions with a program that we call Spark an idea Spark. That process can be as long as five days or even weeks depending on the complexity of the task at hand, but we can also do them in sprints as short as two days because it's based on two fundamental components. First, we start with a vision, which we put forward in creating a clear articulated consumer value proposition. And then we create a prototype to bring that to life and make it a visual understanding of the journey. And that allows us then to prove out the vision and bring all those constituents into the center with us experts when we have something specialized communities when we're building for specific target audiences, our employees and our customers. And then we design and we test, and we design and we test until we get it right. And I'll say that many of the innovations that we have in our industry today have come out of sessions just like this. Back in 2017 when we were just thinking about the impact of voice assistance, for example, we partnered with one of our largest customers to bring them and their consumers in the room. And in doing so, we were able to identify a chat bot servicing process that has resulted in a personalized personified experience and that personification is synonymous now with their brand. We also believe the good ideas can come from anywhere and everyone. And so we're very thoughtful in making sure that we consider the impact of diversity throughout the entire journey and making sure that we stimulate new ideas accordingly. But it starts with our people. MasterCard is a company that is built on a decency culture. We live it and we breathe it, and it means that we intentionally empower our employees and hire our employees to represent the communities that we serve. And so I'll give you two examples. First and foremost, as we think about our employee base, and I know many of us are having to think even more about this, how do we retact attracts talent? How do we retrain our best talent? There's been a lot of change. And again, in the payments industry, things move so quickly we have to hold on to our talent. Well, we do this through a couple of things. First and foremost, we have a incredibly strong set of BRGs or employee communities. We have our Women's Leadership Network, of which I have the distinct honor and pleasure of being the executive sponsor worldwide, 5,000 women strong, who we can tap into and bring their experiences to the table when we're creating new capabilities, even if it's not their day job. And that many of our other communities, we have our pride community, our African heritage lead community, and so many others. We're also committed to making sure that we're strengthening by bringing in more diverse talent. And we know that sometimes we need to rely on partnerships to help us access and identify the best and right talent. And so for example, in trying to bolster our black talent inside the firm, we're partnering with HBCUs and other like partnerships. Why are we doing this? Well, we're doing this because this human-centric design process has shown us with results that creative solutions start with having the utmost empathy, rigor and impact. And therefore, it's an imperative for our business. It's just not the right thing to do. It's an essential thing to do to grow our business. Now of course, we all know MasterCard is in fact a technology company, and so we try to test on ourselves and use the power of technology even in our human and employee experiences. And so one example of that is we've built an AI-based technology platform that we call Unlocked. And this is essentially a talent marketplace, a place in which our employees can load their profiles voluntarily and get connected and connect for so many different purposes. One, identifying mentors, mentors, identifying mentees, but also being able to stand up and raise your hand and be part of a short term assignment or a design and development process. Can you imagine if you were able to reach the experiences of your entire firm? Just because it may not be my day job doesn't mean I can't add value to this assignment and how fulfilling it feels to get to go beyond my day-to-day reach. This has yielded us over 70,000 hours. That's seven years of talent working on projects above and beyond in a voluntary way. That's been incredibly motivating factor for our teammates. And in addition, over 600 projects have occurred where we've had the benefit of increased diversity of thought and experience, which has led to superior innovations. So I'm going to take a moment and share a video with you of an example that has come through our human-centric design.
Video IVR (13:36):
For transgender people. A secure payment doesn't mean protecting yourself from someone buying sneakers with your card. No, if you're transgender, a secure payment means paying for something without being judged, questioned, disrespected, humiliated, harassed, even assaulted simply because the name on your card doesn't match how you identify. This is about more than just keeping a card safe. It's about keeping us safe. True name by MasterCard, the first card that allows you to display your chosen name because that's who you truly are.
Bunita Sawhney (14:31):
True name is one of our most recent award-winning innovations. And it came directly from an innovation session where we were talking with our creative teams and someone was bold enough to share their personal experience, an experience so specific and yet one that most of us would find because it doesn't affect us day to day. What we've learned is when transgender and non-binary people use their credit or debit card at the point of interaction and the name on the card doesn't reflect the person that someone else is seeing or their appearance, it can lead to a very risky experience. It can lead to increased scrutiny, it can lead to rejection at the point of transaction. It can lead to embarrassment, discrimination, and even violence. And so when we learned about this in thinking through opportunities and experiences and needs, we had to dive deeper into it and understand it better. And we were committed to trying to find a relevant solution. When we dove deep, we heard countless stories of consumers who are having experiences just like the one that you heard. And so from that, we brought in members of the community. We brought in members from our creative agency, our account teams, our financial institutions, and we set to design a way to solve this. And from there, our true name card was born. And now people of the transgender and non-binary community are able to go make a transaction with confidence because that card represents their chosen name. And here's what's more. Many of you may be wondering, well, how many innovations can we possibly create and will they scale? I have a business case. I have so many priorities. This product has now scaled to over 33 countries, and we have including here in the United States, millions of consumers using it. And it's something at MasterCard we can feel very, very proud of. Okay, I'm going to keep us going and share another example. This is one I suspect as I look across this room, many of you will probably relate. I know I for one I am a parent. Do we have a number of parents in the room? Anybody? Yes. Right? So many. And I imagine we work in banking and payments, and so as we think about setting our kids up for success, it's obvious, right? How do we help them get the right information that they need to be financially literate and be ready for this world? But actually, when we looked out and zoomed out, we found over 74% of teenagers don't feel confident. They don't feel like they have the financial tools or awareness or literacy that they need to be confident in their financial life. And so our partners at Greenlight, they set out to help us solve for this and help raise financially smart and independent kids. What's particularly cool about this though, because this is an age old challenge, we don't learn about finances anymore in school. In fact, many of us, I'm sure all of you, we learned from our peers or our parents or our communities. And so how do we solve for this in a way that's authentic and meaningful to the way in which these humans, parents and kids interact and learn and spend. And so the MasterCard Green light card solved for exactly that. How does our teenage child receive money? Maybe they can earn it through doing chores or other assignments. How do they save creating savings buckets that are obvious and the ability to create them in app, of course, and how do they plan for their spending and have a card available to them and a digital card too when they're at a point of interaction and they're out with their friends. What's particularly amazing about this to me is we brought in, again, a bunch of audiences and what the green light team learned was that there was multiple solutions to be had, right? Starting with of course, the original app, but there's a whole roadmap of capabilities that have come because there's so many avenues to explore when we brought all these audiences in. And so now they're thinking about solutions. Obviously already. They've solved not only just for the child, but for the parent who can see notifications, who's able to help load, who's able to not load if they don't want to load the card and their are choices to be made. I heard, I loved hearing the panel earlier today saying consumers are going to be making the choices. That's right. Our role is help to enable the experiences that provide secure and clarity, security and clarity in those choices. And so I can tell you this as a parent myself, I have my son, Ajay who's 10 years old. My daughter Omar is 14, and a couple of years ago, we set her up with a green light account. And not only did we find it to be easy to use and hyper personalized, her card has her face on it. It's fabulous, but it also met our values. Why? Because in addition to creating these terrific spending behaviors and having this good understanding of why, how much should I save, et cetera, they have a donations module, and we're going to talk a lot about this new generation's desire with purpose to give. And so it allows her to decide right up front when she receives her allowance or she earns, how much does she want to set aside and be able to give to an organization of her choice such a fun solution. And if you haven't checked it out, I would certainly encourage you to take a look. And I know that many of you are now thinking exactly about this. How do we help meet the digital needs of the generation ahead of us? And so we will share with you that MasterCard has come up with what we call our digital first framework. And by the way, there's some lookouts here because we're going to talk about physical too. But we've learned a few things along the way that are tried and true, including the business results and the business outcomes. Because one thing I know as we again talk about all the choices and the new innovations is we still have to be able to choose what to prioritize and where to put our investment dollar. And so is this the space? Is this what we need to do? And frankly, is it table stakes and it's already been there, done that, or is it still a space that's ripe for change? And I would argue very much it's the latter. Whilst we've made significant progress in digital payments, there's still much to be done. But we know this through our studies, we've learned where do the physical and digital spaces need to align and be similar for consistency and in ease of use? And actually where should they differ? Where should the process be visible to the consumer? Because I need to know and I need assurance. And actually where should it be invisible? Because the friction shouldn't be there and I should just be able to get things done. And so these cues are all part of the human learning process. Back to human, human-centered behavior, right? From those business case outcomes. I'll just share with you this in our digital first programs, we've seen a staggering 40% reduction in consumer servicing channels cost because consumers are able to either have a more intuitive journey or self solve in a digital capacity. We've also seen a 15% increase in overall transaction volume, a 15% increase in new sales and 20 to 25% reduction in fraud because why we knew we're designing in a new channel and anything new, obviously when we talk about nascent capabilities, there's always a little bit more inherent rent risk. So guess what? The risk teams were in the design process too. Now, I mentioned that it's not just about digital, although of course that is one of the more obvious spaces that's evolving so quickly. But what we've learned is there's sometimes unintended consequences when we go to all of these new innovations and physical matters too. So let me share another example with you.
Video IVR 2 (22:30):
Good girl.
Video IVR 2 (22:34):
I was born legally blind
Video IVR 2 (22:37):
For millions of visually impaired people. Paying with a card can be a challenge.
Video IVR 2 (22:42):
Credit cards used to have raised numbers, and now they're unfortunately losing that tactileness.
Video IVR 2 (22:49):
Which one is my credit card? Now I have to get somebody else to go through my cards to pick out this one.
Video IVR 2 (22:56):
I've been in situations where all of the store clerks are just standing in a circle waiting for me to figure out where my card is.
Video IVR 2 (23:03):
It can be exhausting,
Video IVR 2 (23:06):
But what if cards could be identified by touch?
Video IVR 2 (23:14):
Huh? Oh, wow,
Video IVR 2 (23:16):
This is wonderful.
Video IVR 2 (23:18):
Introducing touch card. Buy MasterCard, three distinctly shaped notches. Help people tell the difference.
Video IVR 2 (23:31):
Okay, we have an indent here.
Video IVR 2 (23:33):
It's like notches. All three of them have notches.
Video IVR 2 (23:37):
You'll be able to tell my cards apart.
Video IVR 2 (23:39):
Developed in partnership with Emia Visions and the Royal National Institute of Blind People.
Video IVR 2 (23:45):
This touch card is going to change my whole approach to the way I shop.
Video IVR 2 (23:49):
There are just little things like that can go a long way as far as bringing independence to a blind person
Video IVR 2 (23:57):
Inclusive by design and a step forward for the entire industry. Because a world designed for all of us is priceless.
Video IVR 2 (24:08):
Just a little notch is huge progress.
Bunita Sawhney (24:17):
Progress indeed. So who would've thought as we're getting to all these cool new sleek card designs and we lost embossed numbering on most of our cards, if you look in your wallet today, the vast majority of them won't have the raised numbers anymore. And we just needed to stop and think for a moment. How does that impact our communities and the people that we serve? And of course at MasterCard, we're committed, as I said, to doing well by doing good. And so we couldn't just leave it and keep moving on. We needed to spend some time and figure out if there was a way to solve. And what we also knew was that we are not experts and we needed to bring in partners and experts who could help guide us in the process. And so you will have heard in the video that we worked with the Royal National Institute of Blind People and Visions here in the United States to make sure that their expertise was incorporated in our thinking. We brought members of the community and of course to help tell us where we were going right or wrong, as we went through the design exploration process and we tested and we tested and we tested, and now this product is live here in the United States, and millions are cards are out there with some of our key partners. And I will say what was probably the most astonishing thing was that some of our financial institution partners said, Hey, I don't want to just do this for our blind and partially cited community members. I want to do this for all of our consumers as an act of inclusive solidarity with the entire community. Pretty impressive. And so let's come back to audiences because there are so many consumers and communities and small business owners and large market customers, so many people we want to serve. And yet, I don't know about you, but my budget is for sure not infinite. So we do have to figure out the best and the right way and means to prioritize where can we achieve scale? Where does it matter the most? Where can we truly make an impact? And so I bring you back to human-centric design. Why? Because we know when we bring the audience to the center, again, we have proof points of the reality of the likelihood of the success of the product before we even bring it to market. Here's what we know. We've done extensive research, which we talked about in ways that you do too, but found a powerful set of trends. So I'm going to spend the last session here just taking us through some of the trends that help guide us on how do we prioritize, where can we make the greatest impact? Where do we see the most critical needs as our audiences are evolving? What we know is this, we can no longer rely on the simple segmentation that involves two dimensional factors like age and affluence. We have to do more than that. And the good news is the amount of data and these types of capabilities that are available to us through technology and otherwise, there's no reason why we can't get closer to the consumer and understand them more deeply. And so we have to account for more dynamic, multi-dimensional factors like cultural influences, their sentiments, the consumer sentiment in the moment, which of course we know has impact from even the macroeconomic environment we'll talk about as well as their cultural behaviors. Our approach is one of micro-targeting, right? That lets us observe shifts in daily life, but also how they evolve over the course of a life cycle over time. And what we found is this, one, consumers follow a less traditional path to wealth now than ever before. How we're accumulating wealth and how we're even thinking about wealth is changing dramatically. And I'll give a couple of examples. We are therefore finding new ways to solve for income needs. Entrepreneurialism is at a peak, and fulfillment is found through things beyond money itself. We're also seeing disruptions at a heightened pace and rate than ever before. Why? Well, there's some big stuff happening out there. The world has had a number of critical crises, some of which are still underway. Of course, there's been a pandemic, right? There's been social unrest and volatility in our economy. And all of these things are affecting consumers. They're affecting all of us, and they're affecting how we're thinking about what our needs are and what our priorities are. And so let's set off to think about a couple of these specific trends. First and foremost, there's a shifting of demographics. It's why we give a little caution and care to look at just age and affluence because the reality is our country is more diverse than ever before. Women. While we're still fighting for certain equality and opportunities, we are progressing. And from a payments perspective, it's important to know women continue to control over 70% of household spending decisions. It's an audience that cannot be ignored. Two, identity and family representations have evolved from traditional models, right? We're marrying differently, we're divorcing differently. We have mixed families now. People are living longer, we're getting married later, we're having children later. Each one of these things affects how we bring our capabilities to the market and how people interact with you and with your brands. These are leading to a few themes that we've identified. First, there is a struggle to accumulate wealth, and that's because there's a lack of generational wealth transfer amongst certain communities and growing communities. So it's a lookout. Two, adulthood is not simply an age, it's a mindset. And so we have to help think about where people are at their life stages as we service them with different capabilities and solutions. And wealth is also being defined very differently. Consumers are placing less value on the actual monetary asset and the accounting of the monetary asset, and more value on flexibility and the flexible use of their time, being able to spend time on what matters to them the most. As an industry, we have an opportunity to help consumers achieve their ambitions and shape their future on their terms as trusted partners. And that means understanding their values and what they seek from your brand, from a brand values perspective, and innovating outside the theoretical constructs of the segmentation of the past. We also know that there are tensions. People are feeling the impact of these world crises and other considerations, the social unrest, and they're feeling it in their everyday lives, and that's creating more anxiety than ever before. And so consumers are telling us that they're placing a premium on mindfulness and their mental wellbeing, and they're looking to all of our brands to help them with that too. And you may be wondering why more in payments? How do we do that? Well, we very much have the opportunity to help here. And I'll give you a couple of examples, right? 70% of Americans today are saying that they have anxiety about climate change and they're marching with their feet, but they're also marching with their payment decisions and their brand affinity decisions because they are looking for commitments from the companies that they want to do business with. Two 68% of millennials now are connecting the dots between their mental wellbeing and their financial wellbeing. It's a clear source of stress. If I don't have confidence in how I'm going to run my financial life, and more and more tools are becoming available, whether those are personal financial management tools or otherwise, I would encourage us all to be investing in the things that give consumers assurance and confidence because they're feeling really stressed out. And lastly, I would highlight that almost 50 million American consumers are either invisible or unscorable to the traditional credit rating bureaus, which is making it harder for many of us to provide them with the solutions that they need to have that financial security. But there is good news. It's not all doom and gloo, I promise. At the end of this, there are factors. While there are factors that are leading to this, there are solutions. And when we pull those solutions in, we have an opportunity to make a real impact. People are now taking their financial wellbeing into their own hands. And as I mentioned earlier, entrepreneurialism is at an all time high. In 2001, we had over 5 million small business applications. That number is on the rise. And it's so interesting because it's not just an opportunity for small business owners. Those small business owners are our consumer customers as well, right? Each one of them are finding their own way to create confidence by putting themselves in the driver's seat and having more control over their destiny. In addition, we know that the concerns about the economy are leading to a credit seeking behavior. And I mentioned that statistic around the credit bureaus, but we have an opportunity because we can harness the power of data driven, a new data driven digital age. Open banking is here. Data exchanges are happening. We need to keep them safe and secure. We need to ensure that consumers understand for which they're giving consent and not lose their trust along the way. But when we power solutions with those new capabilities, we can innovate beyond our wildest dreams. And so I do want to talk about the rapid acceleration in technology because there are some risks as well here for us to look out for technology, advance Ansys promise, empowerment and flexibility and discovery. And it's just really fun. But nascent technology does have risks. We all know as we talk about fraud, the newest stuff might be the weak link in the chain. And fraudsters are innovators too. Don't we know it? Right? The metaverse and Web three offers a 13 trillion opportunity, but it also means that we have to be mindful in thinking about data privacy and making sure that we're protecting the information and the information that's flowing. At MasterCard. We believe in connecting people, everyone to priceless possibilities by connecting and empowering a inclusive digital economy that will benefit everyone everywhere. As we all strive to keep up, and I know we're striving and sometimes we hope to even take the lead, we know that the pace of change is one that we have to find ways in which we can jump in and add value. But we think that it's critical to think through every use case, every opportunity, every threat, and everyone. So I will say this individually and collectively, we have the incredible privilege to be designing for a world that we're proud of. We can make consumers and small business owners happy. We can bring joy and fulfillment even through payments every day. It's not easy. It won't happen overnight, and it most certainly cannot be done in a vacuum. We have to bring people into the process. And when we do so with the diversity of their experiences, we absolutely create more powerful, more effective innovations and solutions. It's not just a theory. I will leave you with the business case. We found over the time in practicing and bringing examples like the ones I shared with you today to life, that there are real business outcomes to be had. First and foremost, we know that when we use human-centric design processes, the outcomes drive greater loyalty and more competitive products and can create a competitive advantage. Customers are more likely to be attracted to your brand, use your products, and recommend them to others. In addition, we know, and particularly in the macroeconomic that we're in now, we are all looking for cost savings. But when you know that your product was built most effectively from day one, it will reach scale faster. It will take noise out of the system before you even put it out there, which leads to significant cost savings for you and for your customer because they have something more useful to them from day one. And lastly, and not to be not least important at all is our teams, our employees, the people who we want to bring along on this journey with us. And guess what They want to seat at the table too. When we include our employees in our design processes, there's a sense of pride, there's a sense of commitment, and there's a motivation that comes because one, we care to hear their voices and learn from their experiences, especially when it's not even their day job. And two, they're more likely to be engaged and do their best work in that innovation opportunity, but beyond every day. So I look forward to seeing the innovation from this room and from our peers in the industry that exceeds and delights consumers in the wildest new innovations of the future. And I thank you for your time.
Payments Forum 2023: Opening keynote address: Human-centric design: A winning approach that puts people first
May 23, 2023 11:39 AM
37:34