Find my latest posts on the Alloy Labs blog at AlloyLabs.com Past posts are below.
FinTech
Disruption is Already Here
Disruption is already here. It just isn’t widely distributed yet, as William Gibson famously said about the future. Most of the disruption that we have seen in financial services so far has been on the surface, at the Experience Level. Customer touchpoints are often just digital wrappers around the same-old, same-old. Especially most of those created […]
Success is a Poor Teacher
Bill Gates has said “Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose”. The sweet afterglow of success has a way of redefining as brilliant decisions all of the ways you got lucky, and glossing over a lot of little things that never were quite right along the way. It […]
The Power of One Sigma
Six Sigma is a quality improvement program that gets its name from the concept of 99.9997% quality. In statistics, each sigma represents the statistical measure of 1 standard deviation from the mean in a range of outcomes in a normal distribution. Six sigma translates into no more than 3.4 defects per million opportunities. It is often related to (and sometimes conflated with) […]
Beyond Innovation Theatre
Innovation is all about value creation. Or at least it should be. It’s easy to get caught up in the front end of the process. Brainstorming new ideas, drawing on whiteboards, and moving different colored sticky notes around the wall is fun. But all of that should be a means to an end. That end should be about […]
Integrated Loyalty: How Uber and Capital One Embedded Loyalty into the Customer Experience
This is the last of my special Invested in Tech series with Capital One, where I have been taking a look behind the scenes at how they are using technology, innovation, and design to create a better banking experience. In my last post I spoke to Naveed Anwar who runs Capital One’s developer community partnerships […]
Banking on Blockchain
Last week I attended an IBM blockchain discussion at Rise New York, featuring Jalak Jobanputra, Founder and Managing Partner of Future\Perfect Ventures and Brigid McDermott, Vice President of Blockchain Business Development & Ecosystem for IBM, and moderated by Todd Pruzan, Editorial Director for Ogilvy. You can catch the video of the event here, and also […]
Improving the Consumer Payment Experience
I’m continuing my look behind the scenes at Capital One to see how they are using technology, innovation, and design to create a better banking experience. Last week at Money20/20, I spent some time with Tom Poole, Managing Vice President for Digital at Capital One. I heard Tom speak on a panel called “The Role of […]