Where is the bar?
No not that bar. How do Financial Services designers avoid lowering the bar on quality standards? 
 
“The financial space is different”, we hear this all the time. Yes, it is different just ask Product, UX, or Dev person swimming in the highly regulated seas of finance. Is this mindset affecting how and where we set a UX vision? Are we letting old paradigms set the bar for us without our seeing it? We need to recognize our predisposed concepts of where the bar should be and get our teams there. In this talk, we will explore how this mindset can hamper progress and how it can be overcome.

Brian McLaughlin is a passionate and proven visionary in the areas of user experience, usability, design, standards compliant UI construction techniques, and mobile devices. As the Chief Experience Officer for Bottomline, Brian leads the product innovation team to deliver best-in-class customer experiences across the company’s suite of leading Saas-based business payments solutions. Brian’s career has centered on designing and building customer and user-centric mobile and web-based applications, payment systems, transactional processing systems, e-commerce systems, and marketing systems for fortune 500 and emerging growth technology companies. Brian has worked with leading business and consumer brands, including hundreds of financial institutions around the world, HP, Starbucks, Home Depot, Williams-Sonoma, The Gap, Exxon, Sunoco, and the Department of Defense.

Get to know Brian

What do you enjoy about the work you are doing in finance?
I work in the corporate finance space which means that we have opportunities that don’t exist in the consumer space as well as significant room for improvements. We are not looking at incremental optimization, we look at large leaps. 
 
What gets you most fired up in terms of a technology, tool, trend, or advancement?
Speed and openness.
Speed of the advancement of technologies. The openness of sharing advancements which in turn adds to the inertia.
Speed of accessing interesting technologies. The openness to access these technologies.
Speed of devices. The openness, or at least possibility, to inter-connect devices.
 
What do you think the future of financial experience will hold?
You will have to come hear the talk. 
 
What is the biggest obstacle you face in building a culture of design and innovation or putting a focus on wellbeing? How might the industry solve it?
The opportunities within finance are not obvious to talented young designers and innovators (readers of this sentence excluded of course). A lot of young talent is attracted to the shiny objects of marketing/social networks/ecommerce or have a gravitational pull towards altruism and their perception of the finance industry is based on the bad headlines that make the news. While I don’t have all the answers to solve this, continuing to create great work in the finance space goes a long way to attracting talent. 
 
What would you tell your younger self?
Hey, nice job spotting that the internet is going to be something.
That hair on your head is temporary.