How can financial services keep up in a faster world?

Whoosh! Transformation is accelerating at Blade Runner speeds, leaving no business untouched. Look at all the incredible innovations happening all around us - open banking, crypto, digital currencies, AI, blockchain... That's some seriously cool stuff going on right there.

Unless you're willing to embrace it, you could get left behind. That reminds us of a quote from another great movie: Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop to look around once in a while, you could miss it. But not all companies can move as fast as the world around them. How can you keep up and be part of the future, whatever that looks like?

Here to help us take Ferris Bueller's advice to stop and look around is the best-selling author and world-renowned expert in trends, innovation and marketing - Rohit Bhargava.

Rohit joined comedian Olga Koch on the final episode of the Upfront podcast series to talk about his mission to inspire more non-obvious thinking in the world, something he says will help businesses be more resilient and lead the future.

Here’s some of what he had to say. Listen to that episode in full here or wherever you get your podcasts.

The way to keep up is to become what I call a speed understander

Rohit, please tell us, how can financial services keep up in a faster world?

Rohit It's a good question for anyone. I mean, how can any of us keep up in a faster world? I think what a lot of people are tempted to do is try and become speed readers. What I help them do is be speed understanders instead. So I think that the way to keep up is to become what I call a speed understander or get better at consuming information without taking more time doing it.

Should we all be more selective about what we’re reading or watching?

Rohit Yeah. You don't have to eat the whole doughnut to know that it probably isn't good for you, right? So part of it is knowing right away if something is a waste of your time. What does the celebrity look like now? The picture that we all encounter and get sucked into. It’s about being protective of your own time because there are lots of ways that it gets sucked into things that later feel like, Oh, I should not have eaten that whole box of doughnuts - the media equivalent of that. And yet we spend our time doing that. What I'm encouraging people to do is become more conscious of it so that they don't do that.

You coined the term non-obvious thinking. Tell us more about that.

Rohit I've spent a lot of time building a brand around this idea of being non-obvious as a person. What it means to me is that you see the same things that everyone sees, but you don't think the same thing because you have so many different sources of input and so many diverse perspectives that you're able to see what I call the non-obvious, which is the thing that other people don’t see because their perspective is not diverse enough. It’s a skill set that we can intentionally build in ourselves and it’s based on having more empathy for people who aren't like you. Being more open-minded. If we had more leaders and more of us who were open-minded, that would change the world in a lot of ways because a lot of the conflict in the world ends up happening because people don't understand people who don't think like them.

If we had more leaders and more of us who were open-minded, that would change the world in a lot of ways

We're shutting out potential new ideas from other places because we're laser-focused on our industry

What are some practical steps someone can take to get a more diversified outlook and more perspective?

Rohit Think outside your industry - that's a really big one. When we get into a particular industry, we develop expertise in that industry, and that expertise comes from paying attention to what's happening in that space. We want people who are experts, but the problem with this kind of expertise bias is that people ignore what’s happening in other industries. I work in financial services. I don't care what happens in retail. That's not relevant to me. As soon as we take on that mindset, we're shutting out potential new ideas from other places because we're laser-focused on our industry. So the first piece of advice I give to people is to consume information outside of your industry.

How did you come up with the idea of non-obvious thinking?

Rohit I started taking all of these things that I was reading and putting the pieces together and saying, Well, if this is happening in retail and this is happening in health care, and this is happening in financial services, if you put all those pieces together, here's the macro trend that's happening in the world. Then I started publishing those trends, and people started reading them and paying attention to them. Then I started getting invited to go out to organizations to teach them how to think like that and to speak about it. I wanted to create this framework that anyone could do.

You talk about there being five habits of non-obvious thinkers. What are they?

Rohit The first one is to be observant and to pay attention to details. Walk down the street with your head up, not on your phone. Instead, look around, see what's going on and what's happening. The second one is to be curious, to think about what does this mean? Ask bigger questions. Pay attention to those details. The third is to be thoughtful - taking time to think and pause. Number four is to be elegant - to be intentional and very specific when you describe something. And the last one is to be fickle. To me being fickle means taking an idea, saving it and then moving on. It's the equivalent of getting an idea in the shower. You got the solution in the show, not because of the shower but because you gave your mind a break. So be fickle - save the idea, move on. It may not be relevant at that moment, but later it might be.

There's a huge opportunity right now in financial services to design products and services for underserved markets

Can you give us an example of non-obvious thinking that could be applied in the financial sector?

Rohit So underserved markets are a huge topic in financial services, and one example from outside the industry that could offer some inspiration is Reframed which was founded by two African-American entrepreneurs.They looked at the market for eyeglasses and realised that there were no eyeglass manufacturers making eyeglasses for wider-brimmed noses or faces. A lot of African-Americans need wider lenses, so they created this company and served a whole different segment that was not served by anyone. And to me, there's a huge opportunity right now in financial services to design products and services for underserved markets. The problem is a lot of these companies that have the opportunity to do that don't have people working there who look like those customers. They don't have leadership that looks like those potential customers and so they don't think of that. The innovation never happens because there's no one who represents that group in that team.

How to be a forward-thinking financial services business

I believe that the trends are never about technology, they're about what people do with technology or how that technology affects people's lives

How do you see what trends are coming?

Rohit I'm spending six hours every week reading stuff that is unrelated to anything I'm working on. I find things people aren’t really paying attention to. Over time a story that I found three months ago might relate to something I saw yesterday and might relate to something I see three weeks from now. And all of a sudden, you see a trend happening there. You don't need a special talent to see those things. Your brain already wants to do that. You just have to give it the right input to be able to think that way.

What stories or information grabs your attention?

Rohit I look at something that demonstrates that there may be some momentum. So something that seems to be taking off that not that many people are paying attention to. Something I haven’t seen someone do before or something that hasn’t happened before.

At the end of the day, I believe that the trends are never about technology, they're about what people do with technology or how that technology affects people's lives.

How forward-thinking do you find financial services compared to other industries?

Rohit I think it’s in the middle and probably on the more risk-averse side because of regulation. But it doesn't give anyone a licence to say, well, we don't want to be innovative, or we should always be second because at the end of the day, in every industry there's always an early mover and there's always late movers. I think the real challenge for any organisation is to say, how fast do we want or need to evolve and what level of disruption are we comfortable with? To some degree that comes down to the leadership; how forward-thinking are they? Honestly, and this is probably kind of tough to hear, but honestly, how much do they care about how competitive that company is in ten years? It's why companies like Amazon, where they have a leadership that can afford to say, how is this going to play out ten years from now and we don't care if we lose money for four years, that's why they win, because they have a long-term mindset that other companies just don't.

What future trends and changes do you see having the biggest impact on financial services?

Rohit One megatrend is Flux Commerce which is this idea that the lines between industries are blurring. I think that's going to affect every industry. It raises big questions, like what happens when your grocery store becomes your bank? How would that change everything? What happens when you start to merge your retirement fund with your favourite clothing retailer? These are the sorts of questions that I think are going to have to be asked within financial services to prepare for the future. Another is Human Mode - where do we add humanity and where do we invest more in people and where do we invest more in automation and how do we get that balance right? That's going to be huge in financial services.

What happens when you start to merge your retirement fund with your favourite clothing retailer? These are the sorts of questions that I think are going to have to be asked within financial services to prepare for the future

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