New value added services for old clients

Client: ING Bulgaria

Client brief: Develop an innovative service offering

Approach: facilitated design sprints

Duration: March – April 2014

Key results: 10 employees successfully trained on the job and 1 innovative idea submitted to ING Global Innovation Challenge (prized in top 10, out of 1800 submitted ideas)

Success factors: work on a project addressing a real business problem, support from CEO and participation in all sessions

Choosing an innovation direction

In 2014 ING approached us with the idea to train a core team of innovators and at the same time co-create an innovative idea that ING Bulgaria could submit to the ING Global Innovation Challenge. 

The topic chosen was related to the underserved customer segment of SMEs who fall in between big corporate clients that get a lot of attention and personalized services from their banks and private clients, who benefit from the latest digital offerings.

From customer needs to a business model in 8 weeks

We worked for 8 weeks and went through two intense design sprints together with the client. As part of the work we did in-depth customer research through interviews and focus groups. We did storyboarding and wireframing to visualize and test the new service with customers. In the second design sprint we focused on the business modelling in order to validate and describe the business value, resources needed and potential revenues.  

The results: top 10 out of 1800

The end result was a truly innovative concept for digital value added platform for SMEs that was prized in the top 10 innovative ideas by ING Global management (out of 1800 submitted ideas).