Stanford d.school / Redesigning Finance

How design work can help shape the future of finance

Company

Stanford d.school

Year

2020

Project Type

Design Thinking

Timeframe

10 Weeks

Redesigning Finance is a 10-week program at the Stanford d.school revolving around how design work can help shape the future of finance.

Our focus and design challenge was around learning how to navigate ambiguity and reimagine resilient financial relationships through a mix of divergent and convergent thinking. I was selected to join the class as a Fellow-in-Residence to help create learning experiences for students by adding real-world experience to the mix and shaking up their methodology.

Project setup

Within a class of 15 students, three Stanford students and I formed a team with different backgrounds and skill sets. We were given a design challenge that we worked on in four stages: Discover, Define, Develop, Deliver. All of the work was done virtually and we used Mural as our main platform to collaborate and brainstorm. The objective was not to deliver something finished, but rather insights for where to start.

Discover

To kick off the project, we hosted a panel with guest speakers to give them a platform to share their experience as survivors of the Paradise Fires in California, and another group talking about how the novel COVID-19 virus has impacted them and their businesses. This gave us a first understanding of the types of people that are affected by disasters, how they were affected, and how the system is currently broken. From there, we identified a list of several stakeholders (Small Business Owners, Non-profits, Startups) that we wanted to interview for further insights. We reached out to our personal and professional networks as well as via Social Media to recruit participants for a round of empathy interviews.

Interviews

After a few days of recruiting, we were able to secure a total of 6 participants with various backgrounds (3 SMB Owners, 1 Startup Employee, 1 Startup CFO, and 1 Non-profit Organization Leader) and interviewed them in teams of two (Note taker and Moderator), following the discussion guide I had previously put together. Our main objective was to get a basic understanding of how they dealt with post-disaster finance and the PPP application. By using empathy probes during our sessions we were able to elicit emotion-rich conversations with our participants and help reduce friction by creating a safe space for them to speak their mind. We collected our interviews notes in a collaborative Mural board where we also highlighted some key takeaways for each of them.

Synthesis

‍As a next step, we took those key insights and tried to find recurring patterns between their different stories and experiences. We started clustering them together and giving each group a title. The common themes we saw in our participants' stories were:

Difficulties pre, during, and post application process

Resources and prior connections dictated success

Lack of communication from banks

Cognitive load

Influence of key stakeholders

Although some initial ideas popped up after the first exercise, we wanted to synthesize these insights further to get more clarity around what the real pain points are. We created "Point of Views" (POVs) and "Surprise-to-Insights leaps" by presenting our findings to one another, interpreting the behavior, and adding our findings into the following template:
‍
1 We met ...
2 We were surprised to notice ...
3 We wonder if this means ...
4 It would be game-changing if ...

This allowed us to come up with many different directions which sparked even more ideas around what our solution could look like.

Define

In the next stage, we took our insights and ideas one step further and started phrasing "How Might We" statements to launch ideation. Our focus here was to keep them broad enough to include a wide range of solutions, but narrow enough to impose helpful boundaries. Most importantly, we had to make sure our statements weren't too suggestive of a solution yet.

After receiving valuable feedback and going through a few rounds of iterations, we mapped out the strongest HMW statement that would open up a lot of potential for different solutions while defining the most common pain point we heard in our interviews:

How might we democratize access to informal information and networks to continuously help small business owners who lack social capital?

Develop

With our problem statement in hand, we went on to the next stage: developing. Different brainstorming exercises helped us fully explore a variety of solutions. For one of our activities, we came up with several scenarios and solutions, and (even though most of them were unlikely and seemed silly), it really pushed us to think outside the box and come up with great ideas. One of the examples of the prompts and questions we created was:

"What would [ a legislator // Mark Zuckerberg // an alien // a banker ] do?"

Or, another prompt was: "What would be the solution to our problem [ if you could fix it tomorrow // if you had a robot // if you had a magic wand // if you were a kid ] ?"

We recorded all of our responses, voted on the best ones, and discussed how we can take those concepts and turn them into a more feasible and realistic solution. Some of the answers had the right idea but needed some further interpretation, i.e. "If I was a kid, I would ask my parents for help." In this scenario, a kid would look for a role model, for someone whose opinion they trust. In our case, a small business owner's go-to person would be a close connection, a referral, or someone who's been in their shoes before. What if there was a way to establish such trusted relationships and make them accessible to everyone? These exercises and discussions helped us explore multiple solution concepts.

More feedback

Luckily, we had the chance to conduct more feedback sessions with our stakeholders and experts and, with the knowledge and insights we had previously gained, could ask more specific questions around the most important factors needed in a solution, and if we were on the right track with ours. Here are some extremely valuable insights that influenced and validated our final solution concept:

Community is the best insurance policy.

Spend money now to save money later.

Whatever the solution is cannot be commoditized or instantly delivered.

Trust and competencies need to be in place beforehand.

Putting it all together

After using these methods and with our HMW statement in mind, my group and I sat down and put the pieces together. We dedicated our solution focus to the issue of inequity of small versus large businesses when it comes to financial help post-disaster, and the importance of social capital. In response, we proposed the development of an online exchange platform – California Communities for Financial Resilience (CA CFR) – to enhance access, clarity, trust, and community and will serve as a go-to, year-round community for small businesses to connect whenever they are in a pinch. We did a first dry run of our preliminary presentation and iterated our messaging based on the feedback we received.

Deliver

We delivered our project in two different parts – a 10-min presentation to our principal partner, the California Office of Emergencies (OES), and an executive summary. For our final presentation we had to cover everything from research to the finished solution, so we structured our findings as follows:
‍
1 This is happening ...
2 Because of this, ...
3 So how might we ...
4 What if ...
5 Some features are ...
6 Some benefits are ...

We received positive feedback all around and the OES agreed that having a platform for small business owners to exchange information and seek help would be a step in the right direction to achieve more resiliency for post-disaster support.

You can find the final presentation as well as the executive summary and links to the class below.

Video presentation

Links

Program website

Collaboration board

CAL OES website

Summary

The Small Business Association’s Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) – intended to support small businesses with payroll during the COVID-19 pandemic – exposed the extreme inequities of disaster relief programs in California and the U.S. more broadly. It was evident from the “winners and losers” of the first round of loans that one’s network and resources pre-disaster dictated their financial resiliency and ability to access loans post-disaster. Of the 4 million small businesses in California, our research showed a stark contrast in navigating the PPP loan process between those with and without social capital. True “small” businesses, especially those managed by historically underrepresented groups, were locked out of the first round of PPP, facing many institutional barriers, whereas venture-backed startups and other well-resourced and well-connected businesses were able to secure million dollar loans in the first round. In approaching a redesign to this experience, there were many potential areas of focus, but we saw the largest area of improvement around the following question:

‍How might we democratize access to informal information and networks to continuously help small business owners who lack social capital?

In response, we are proposing the development of an online exchange – California Communities for Financial Resilience (CA CFR) – to enhance access, clarity, trust, and community. This platform will be built to extend past this crisis, serving as a go-to, year-round community for small businesses to connect whenever they are in a pinch.Specifically, the all-in-one platform will offer Quora-like verification of posts supervised by the California Governor's Office of Business and Economic Development (GO-Biz), upvote functionality as seen in Reddit to identify top needs, a chatbot feature like Intercom to triage needs, a heat map to facilitate close by connections and a financial health test to detect potential vulnerabilities ahead of disasters. In order to implement CA CFR, we propose a close partnership between GO-Biz and private sector companies (notably banks and technology companies). A public sector office such as GoBiz brings essential legitimacy to the platform and can verify information shared by business-owners in order to offer a single source of truth. The private sector, on the other hand, can provide the capital, speed, and innovation to build a scalable and intelligent platform.
‍
With California in a constant state of disaster, the time is now to invest more deeply in communities and amplify peer-to-peer connections in a centralized and scalable way. By promoting disaster preparedness, CA CFR could become a sustainable online community that will build the trust, competencies, and network necessary to navigate the next disaster.