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IBS Journal December 2017


39


I ask him exactly how he is going to do that. Houlihan says: “We are adopting a research and development-forward approach to innovation. We are doing this is in a few different ways. Firstly, we have set up three laboratory environments within our enterprise. The first is a joint venture with a company called Pivotal Labs, located in Chicago, and its purpose is to focus on making us more agile. We are a heavily regulated organisation so we have to be very careful.


“What we do is we put people into the lab and then we matriculate them back out into the enterprise to deliver the sharp, fast, agile ability they have now developed back into the mainstream of the bank and the enterprise. We are also doing work in enterprise robotics, and we have a partner in a company called Blue Prism.


“The second lab we have set up is called our Client Partner Exchange (CPX) and this is where we have our experts in human- centric design and where we are looking in detail at the way people are expecting to interact with us and how we can make that interaction better and more sophisticated. The lab brings expertise to bear, but we can run early projects through there to ensure 1) consistency in the user experience we are giving 2) to ensure that we have human-centred principles thoroughly embedded in our thinking. This ensures that we are working with the technologies, such as HTML 5, that are going to be a fundamental part of the digital experience of our clients in the future.


“With these two labs what we are trying to do is ensure that product decisions are mapped back against both labs to ensure that what we are building, as we move forward, is in line with the design principles that we espouse. We are determined to be


true to our new methodologies and the new technologies we are exploring.


“The third lab is what we call our Global Fund Accounting Innovation lab (GFAI) and in that lab, which has a dual purpose, we are concentrating on making our staff more efficient. We have a large number of fund accountants around the world who we need to keep sharp and up to date, and we need to get more efficient in the ways that we do that. The methodology we are applying there is Dual Prism and robotics, but we also need to deal with the human dynamic in this new world.


Northern Trust has been aware for a while that it has to take its staff along with it on this technological journey. Houlihan says: “We have to deal with a multi-generational workforce and we need to know whether we are providing our employees with the correct motivation, tools and workspaces to keep them efficient. We are constantly asking if they have the right tools to do the job and to keep them motivated and efficient.”


Houlihan is talking about a phenomenon no doubt recognised by many of the more significant banks, but which is often just ignored. This is the generation gap between the very senior staff who carry out the bank’s wealth management and the newer ones who have been brought up with digital, and for whom digital change is something they not only accept but savour. It is interesting to see that Northern Trust is actively dealing with this and I ask Houlihan more about it.


“We have built out a new work environment across the bank which is a bit more cutting edge – flat-panel displays, high ceilings – as if you were back in the nineties internet boom. What we have


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