Victor Iancu: Designing new fintech experiences to unlock growth

Show Notes

Victor Iancu leads the Business and Service Design practice of KPMG in Romania and Moldova. He is a serious UX design and strategy guru, a seasoned business strategist and advisory leader supporting private and public sector clients in an emerging economy for almost 20 years.

He combines strategy tools, business & economic research with design thinking to successfully help clients identify new business opportunities, create and capture new sources of value and create new business models and ventures.

He’s an advocate of building trust-based, long-term, profitable business relationships and draws upon a professional coaching background, empowering people to discover and use their strengths, own the processes they work on and take accountability for their work, while leading by example, with ethics at the core of his personal and professional values.

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Mike Parsons: [00:00:00] Welcome to unbounded tokes on growth in financial services. Hi everyone. I'm your host, Mike Parsons. And today we're talking to Victor in our coop from K P M G. He is a serious UX design and strategy guru, Victor. Welcome to the.
Victor Iancu: Hi, Mike. Thanks for having me so glad to be here.
I feel like we should have had champagne at the rate. We should be celebrating, but we can celebrate while we talk about some of the. The work that you've been doing. And as we can really dig into the growth equation for financial services. So where I'd love to start with is you're spending a lot of time working with banks and other innovators at KPMG.
I'm really keen to understand how you got into this role as a [00:01:00] partner at the firm and advising these customers on user experience and strategy. How did you get there? Tell us a little bit about that.
Victor Iancu: Whoa, that's a let me think about it. So basically it starts early with my first career step, I started my career in a economic research Institute where basically I started studying innovation from a theoretical point of view.
And that was the moment where I Realized I like it so much. And after two years in research, basically I wanted to actually put into practice a lot of the things that I was discovering and that's how I got into consulting. So basically this is. Where it started. And whilst I managed to to get into consulting and joined KPMG what I did basically is to follow this session and basically [00:02:00] built a business case within the entire organization builds obviously on all the assets on the network that the organization allowed me to build on.
And here we are.
Mike Parsons: It's perfect. It's perfectly. And after nine years at key KPMG and working so closely with enterprises, with banks and financial services, I'm very interested to know what is the best part of your day. What's your favorite part of the day? That gets you super excited. And has you coming back from.
Victor Iancu: I think as I have my coffee in the morning I usually plan the days beforehand. When I finished a day, I planned the day after. So when I have my first coffee in the morning, I look at what I've planned. The previous day. And usually I change 50% of it. What I like so much and what keeps me going every day is the fact that I get to do a very interesting [00:03:00] type of job, which is.
Discovering and experimenting it's actually keeps me going and keeps the team going. And I'm quite grateful to historically having bosses that allowed me to and allowed us as a team to experiment. This is not very common actually in in business because experimentation.
Also means failing and that psychological safety that you need to put in place in order to keep this this moving. The fact that we work with clients that want to change, want to innovate, want to transform gives us that intellectual trigger and push to be at our best every everyday.
And actually that's exciting. Every time you go into a conversation on just stand a challenge. You go into that exploration discovery mode [00:04:00] and yeah, that's what keeps me going actually.
Mike Parsons: So the freedom to discover just sounds like it gives you a world of possibilities, like in any conversation on any project, it sounds like you have the time and the space to imagine new solutions, new services.
That's gotta be pretty fun. It is fun. As you can imagine it's not always a clear path. Usually when you start a project it's you need to be really comfortable with not understanding everything, not knowing what's coming. And usually this can be tiresome for someone who's not very used to it, but as you embrace.
Victor Iancu: And it becomes a professional lifestyle, you get used to it and you actually enjoy it. And the business world, everything is as executives wants everything [00:05:00] to be predictable and they would ask, they will be asking you for, okay, what's coming next.
What's going to get out of this. And when you say Let's work together and see how this evolves. You can see maybe that's not the answer that they were expecting, but it's also a sort of educational sort of role that we have in this in our role. And I don't I don't mean to sound condescending and not educational in terms of theories and stuff, but actually.
It's very, it's understandable that executives want results. They want to know what's going to happen, but innovation it's about exploration. It's about scenarios. It's about trial and error. So it's it's a mix, it's a balance. And it's also a game of. Human to human. Basically the word that comes to mind is political game, [00:06:00] because at that level it usually is is the case, but as you set the stage correctly, from the very beginning, I set the expectations correctly.
Things are moving very well. It's almost like you can learn from each other and in that collaboration, you can manage the right risks so you can have growth, but without without all of that risk. And I think that's an important chemistry between someone like yourself and a banking executive, right?
Absolutely. Absolutely. And nobody likes this but when you Together with with the client, try to understand how to mitigate that risk. You define the risk and then you understand how to mitigate it. I think that's the first step. Nobody likes to risk, but everybody likes to understand ways of mitigating risks.
So as long as we do that a big part of managing risk is better [00:07:00] thinking and better decisions I'm keen to know. Like how do you think through problems and solutions and how do you make decisions, Victor? It's a very good question. I like to think of myself as a student. Thinker, I train my strategic muscle as as often as possible, but it's not always possible.
And sometimes you need to use what you know is not scientifically, but what we call the gut feeling and gut feeling is not just I was reading an interesting book on the psychologist I mentioned of executive coaching and. They were talking about gut feeling as well. This is not something that comes out of the blue, it's something that's built on years of experience and expertise.
And while I try to be self-aware every time I make a decision to analyze all the variables surrounding me, sometimes you just can't, you don't have the time. You don't have the resources, the [00:08:00] pressure, et cetera, et cetera. And On learning to actually listen to this gut feeling. I've had situations where I didn't have enough information about a situation.
And my gut feeling told me to go into that direction and I did it and I base my decisions on this little information I had and I was wrong. And then I started to think, okay, how should I integrate this? Okay, let's call it a tough feeling into more decision-making at a specific point in time where I don't have the luxury of gathering all the information and stuff like that.
So this is what I'm working on. That is we could do a whole show on this, Victor. I would say for our listeners, if they're interested in this topic, there's a great book by Daniel Kahneman thinking fast and slow, which speaks exactly to what you've just mentioned, Victor. That is a really fabulous piece of advice to our listeners.
Mike Parsons: How they. [00:09:00] Bring their intuition into the process. It's part of decision making it's part of risk management. It's part of innovation. That's great. Okay. Just a reminder, you are listening to unbounded talks and this is brought to you powered by flow X. So you can check out all of our show notes.
You can check out all the goodies that come with our show at unbounded dot flow X dot a. All right now, Victor, you have been very busy while some of us were just stumbling across the end of the year in December after what it was definitely another crazy year, you managed to publish a report and this report is called the value for money economy.
Meets the connected customer. And as a contributing expert to that, there are some big ideas, particularly for anyone in financial services. There's four big ones. I'd love to jump into them. Where would you love to see. [00:10:00]
Victor Iancu: Yeah, absolutely. This is this is the research that's been going on globally in KPMG for the last 13 years and the insights we've been gathering quite amazing actually.
And it shows the shifts in consumer behavior and how industries are trying to adapt to this. Yeah. We could go into the the, let's say the main four elements that we can see basically around the globe. One is that old customers expect a decline in their spending in the next six to 12 months.
And that's something too to take into account by all industries or all kinds of businesses because savings are becoming a problem. And all financial segments, the see value for money a, as a key purchase driver. Paying attention to the share of wallet of your customer, understanding your customer changing behavior in relation to your brand to the surface as a product there that [00:11:00] purchasing it's not a it's something nice to do.
It's a must in in, in the next period and use it. Psychographics, demographics, and actually a lot of digital tools that allows us to allow us to do this. It's an advice we've been providing lately. Another trend is that the trust in, in, in brands that the customers trust is decreasing.
And this is a danger. One of our. Main customer extremist pillars is integrity. Integrity is or behind the integrity pillar are all those actions that build trust in a brand and in the pandemic, in this pandemic, we've seen a lot of Trust breaking actions from a lot of firms, a lot of organizations all around sectors and industries.
So how [00:12:00] you build trust, how you connect to the customer and keep your promise as a brand, how you set expectations correctly and then manage those expectations is becoming more and more important.
Mike Parsons: I would just want to jump in there because you're already shaking the room with these first thoughts.
First of all, spending is going to dramatically change and has crossed. These are two major shifts in the way consumers think about the products that they use, that they consider that they purchase. This is massive already. Isn't it? It's massive. And from what we've seen there are companies that not many that are capitalizing on a lot of investment pre pandemic times into understanding that customers and how these elements that I've just discussed are changing.
Victor Iancu: And now they're just capitalizing going on this understanding, but most of the organizations are not really. [00:13:00] Spot on into understanding these two aspects. And this is these two especially when we talk about trust, this is the hygienic factor in any relationship, not only commercial one business trust is at the core of everything that we do commercially.
Mike Parsons: You would say Victor, you would say Victor it's almost for any sort of two-party relationship. Trust is the underlying foundation, whether it's both personal professional as a consumer or part of a team. These are two really big ones. Yeah. Y you mentioned that not many organizations have yet to take full advantage or take the opportunity with the change in spending and.
Why is that? It's a very interesting question. I think there are many reasons behind this. The one that I'm mostly intrigued by is [00:14:00] they didn't consider it. Important business was just going to it was not on top of their mind. Alright. So this intrigues me because when you talk to someone towards an executive customer, the customer's the customer base, it's always there in their conversation.
Victor Iancu: They talk about strategies to customers. Paint closer. Look you start to understand them to discover that it's just a it's just a word it's just fluff in in in many situations. But as things are changing and with consumers Being more and more demanding, how being able to compare and th the many choices they have right now, especially with digital, because many firms opened digital pathways as a result of the COVID.
They have the possibility. Now they have the power, right in the value chain, in the big [00:15:00] value chain of everything that customer has a much more important role than 10, 15 years. Because simply because they can
Mike Parsons: easily change. Yes. Switching, switching has never been so easy, has it? Absolutely. It's just the click of a button and people are able to consider something else.
There's so many comparison sites. So it looks like trust is a big one. Savings and understanding that spending is really changing, really stemmed from the fact that financial services and banks really need to listen to their customers. Do you ever like a practical tip? What advice would you give for any banking executive?
If you wanted to give them a suggestion on how they might listen to their customers, how they might better understand.
Victor Iancu: Yeah. Yeah, but what you just said, it actually it's an example we take from is different, for instance from e-commerce where it's very simple to have sensors, we call them sensors right in your [00:16:00] customer base and understand almost instantly what's going on in terms of purchasing trends, et cetera, et cetera, because it's there.
You can see if you can build dashboards and stuff like that. What. What I would advice is to build those sensors and to actually bring human centric mentality at the core of the organizations culture, because you see customer experience, user experience, customer centricity, these are all becoming some sort of business stats everybody's talking about.
Fewer actually doing it. Customer experience is not just something for the. Or for the, or a department that has the governance of this specific topic, it's actually a cultural thing. Customer experience is everybody's job in the organization. That's why, for instance, when we work with the organization organization, we make sure that we build champions all around the organizations up and down left and rights [00:17:00] front office, middle office, back office.
So when. Any, or every decision that is being made, someone asked the question, what is the customer impact of this specific decision? Being it being marketing, being product, it doesn't really matter. So this is you're asking for a specific advice. This is a specific advice, but not something very easy to do because it's about changing.
It's doable, of course. And you can see how easy it is for startups because an or younger organizations that are basically building from the very beginning of their processes, their technology, their systems, their people skills around a customers, it's so hard for. Yeah it's so hard for mature organizations that have a a different structure, legacy systems, all of a sudden become customer centric.
But it's not impossible. This is the journey they need [00:18:00] to walk.
Mike Parsons: How exciting. What you're really talking about is that the key to designing great customer experiences is not only listening to your customers and sensing the customer, but it's building champions, building a cultural transformation, which is easily said and much harder to do.
But I want to give you the chance to talk about the two other big trends. That you've outlined in this report. And just for our listeners, we're going to have a link to the report in the show notes. Those show notes will be at unbounded dot flow, x.ai. And this, the title of the report that Victor was an expert contributor on is the value for money economy meets the connected customer.
All right, Victor you've hit us with some big ones so far. You've got two more. What else did you learn in this? The third one is I guess on everybody's mind these days is they just want interaction, digital pathways. Now the [00:19:00] pandemic basically, and we've seen this in 20, in our 2020 research the pandemic Brought a new reality in terms of how do customers interact with their brands?
Victor Iancu: In 2020, a lot of the brands that we've been surveying could not be validated by our methodology because we did not have enough customer responses. Why simply because they did not interact with their brands. Why? Because their channels were purely physical, but people were staying at homes.
The champions of 2020, and I'll immediately go to 2021 where those organizations that already had a digital pathways to allow customer interaction and business continuity on digital channels. Those that were fast enough to actually start building them and allow this business continuity or also we're also there.
What we saw in 2021. Lots on this market, at least many [00:20:00] organizations in started to invest in building digital channels, visual pathways to allow customer or customer interaction. So digital now is not something good to have. It's a must. Why? Because people, and this is very interesting in a very short amount of time.
People realized how easy it is to interact with the brands how inexpensive it is, and this is here to stay. Also the pandemic, this will not return to the previous state. So it's something it's a huge window, let's say for the customer and they will be demanding this.
Mike Parsons: Yes. It probably, we will look back at the last two years. And we will say that it was the biggest media channel switch in the history of the consumer. When you think about the introduction of radio, print, and television, and then the internet, the switch to a [00:21:00] mobile app, mobile first experiences.
When you, when we look back at this, there's where I think we're going to be shocked at how much of a. Has come in such a short time. And digital really is at the very center of it. Isn't
Victor Iancu: it? It is. It is, but I we need to, and this is also a piece of advice for organizations that are building the digital pathways, digital channels right now, digital and the digital technology.
Is a tool. Digital is being mapped to a customer need, which translates into a business need. If you map the technology without understanding where your customer is or where it is moving that could be problematic. So digital goes hand in hand with understanding consumer behavior mapping this correctly allows you to differentiate.
Mike Parsons: Yeah, it's a really good point. The [00:22:00] technology really does need to serve not only the consumers, but also the employees of the bank as well. We're going to come back to technology in a second show because there's just so much to unpack in this great report that you contributed to.
But I w I would love you to, just to mention this last, if there wasn't enough change already. There is one other habit that has changed dramatically, which is really affecting financial services. Do you want to talk about work from home? Yeah. Work from home can be also in the subject of a a whole conversation.
Victor Iancu: Yeah. Yeah. This new habit is also shaping up because working from home means putting in place new routines and I'm already in terms of work-life balance, but also in terms of And lifestyle means will influence the, how consumer spent. So a 13%, for instance, this is from our global report.
13% of consumers declined. They have moved home as a consequence of a new [00:23:00] situation. So net confidence in walking and cycling up to the up by 9%. What confidence in public transportation has fallen to minus 37%. So this will impacts how customers will also interact with all their brands. And while some customers predict they will prefer to continue working from home in the future.
They are not keeping giving up on their travel plans, though. They are shifting to destinations, which are closer to home. And this impacts a Latino, the travel and leisure industry as well. We need to pay attention as organizations to this trend as well, because it will influence spending patterns and customer behavior.
Mike Parsons: Yeah. And I think here at what we see is a direct relationship to the changing nature of the branch in a banking context, the way in-person interactions happen between financial service brands and their customers, it's all up for [00:24:00] grabs. Things are changing at light speed. And I really loved these four trends, three being consumer centric, one being channel centric.
We've got savings is on the. Spending on the decrease trust is really up in the air right now between both consumer brands and their customers. People are working from home embracing hybrid, working and digital pathways. Digital connections are really at the forefront of customer experiences, particularly those with financial services.
Now we touched on technology, Victor, and I feel that. I would love to make this invitation to you. Now. I think we should do a follow-up show where we go a bit deeper into some of the technology behind these trends and that we look at the future of technology for financial services. Would you like to join me again?
Victor Iancu: Would be my pleasure. Absolutely
Mike Parsons: fantastic. Now, before we wrap up, we love having a [00:25:00] chart of the day and it's perfect for our next show. And this chart comes to us courtesy of Silicon valley. And it's called the evolution of FinTech. And it's a crazy slide because it shows us the history of financial technologies.
And if you'd love to get a copy of this, it will be in our show notes. You can grab those from unbounded dot Flo x.ai and Victor. These first three stages of FinTech. It's incredible to see what's happened. Looking at the slide, what standard the word that comes to mind is obviously evolution of revolution.
Victor Iancu: And looking at the final the last stage that in here the centralizing finance and decentralized finance I'm thinking in terms of what can come next in terms of blockchain technology and how it has the potential to basically disrupt any regulated industry nowadays.
Because that's what it's doing [00:26:00] to, to financial services. It's amazing. There's a lot of literature around the subject and a lot of forecasts. I, yeah, I'd love to have the conversation on this specific topic as well the potential is huge.
Mike Parsons: It really is particularly when you think of a retail bank might be forced to become a wholesale bank and help others be banks.
And if you start to entertain this idea, it is really changing the very DNA of banking and financial services.
Victor Iancu: Isn't it? Absolutely. If it basically shakes up the whole value chain of traditional one absolutely. We've got all that to look forward to in our next conversation. Victor, when we dive into some of the technology behind your trends now for all of our listeners if they would like a copy of the report that you contributed to, we're going to have a copy, a link to that [00:27:00] report in our show notes at unbounded.
Mike Parsons: X.ai, but Victor, if they want to find you, if they want to get in touch with you on that worldwide into web, how can people find you? I guess the easiest way is to connect on LinkedIn. It is the easiest way. Otherwise on the KPMG website, they can find my contact addresses, but I think LinkedIn is the easiest way to.
Victor Iancu: And happy to connect with anyone who would like to know more about the report and the,
Mike Parsons: as a matter of fact we really appreciate that Victor. Victor, absolutely. I can't thank you enough for sharing your time with us, but more importantly, you gave us four big ideas and you set up the next show where we're going to study the technology and what it's going to take to make these new experiences for customers.
What is it going to take to make them happen? What it's going to take to delight customers. So Victor, a big thanks to you. I hope you enjoyed being on the show today.
Victor Iancu: Thank you very [00:28:00] much, Mike. It's been a pleasure and yeah. Happy to join anytime soon.
Mike Parsons: All right, Victor, thank you to you and thank you to you.
All of our listeners, you've been listening to unbounded talks. This is powered by flow ex. If you'd like to know more head over to flow ex.ai, that's a wrap.