Building a Design Lab at BT. Lessons learned - with Andrei Baican, Head of Customer Experience

Did you know that BT has a Design Lab? Our colleague, Andrei Baican, Head of Customer Experience @Banca Transylvania, had the opportunity to tell more at the Design Thinking Forum,an event organized in Bucharest.

I took over in this article the main ideas sent by Andrei, about the connection between Design Lab and digital banking and, why not, to see once again that BT is #coolbank:

• The Design Lab comes to support the bank's business lines and, implicitly, contributes to building a better experience for the over 3 million BT customers, especially in the digital banking area.
• According to the InVisionstudy, companies are in one of 5 levels in terms of maturity design. Level 5, the most mature, is represented by visionaries,who include design in the core strategy of their business.
• BT has reached level 4, where we are also testing digital products and analyzing them. The BT journey started from level 1, when the focus was only "production", we went to level 2, when we started to do workshops with the bank's business lines. Then I went to level 3, when the organization and prioritization followed.
• Basically, digital banking through design thinking means a step forward for personalizing the money offer, efficiency +, better knowledge of customers
• Lessons learned on this journey:

- Define the vision:You must have a vision to succeed in including the design thinking method in generating new concepts for the bank's business lines.

- It's ok to make mistakes:We try, experiment and accept a margin of error.

- Job rotation:We create multifunctional teams for different projects, based on complementarity, performance and experience in different areas.

- Fast delivery: We deliver quick wins.

- Celebrate success:We celebrate small and big victories after each project, which maintains the enthusiasm for the new design thinking methodologies that prove to be effective.

The story of Design Lab at BT began in 2016, at Liberty Technology Park in Cluj-Napoca, when the digital banking hub transforms the bank's offer into digital solutions. Basically, it launches and manages projects by connecting creative ideas. The team comprises almost 100 people with an average age of 35 years. It's a mix of specializations: from banking to IT.

Why Design Thinking? Because it is a way of solving situations or problems through which, most often, innovation is reached.