BPAY Group’s Strategic Design-Driven Transformation – Placing People at the Centre

To succeed in the fast-moving, rapidly changing world of payments and financial services, BPAY Group’s leadership team recognised the imperative to innovate, specifically, to present more value to its customers and establish brand-new revenue streams. This was no short-term fix, it required no less than a strategic, business model, operational and cultural transformation. They needed to establish an operating model to leverage its core strengths whilst encouraging experimentation. This shift would require an internal innovation capability, one that responds to rapidly changing market conditions whilst lowering the risk of exploring internal initiatives and brand-new ventures.

BPAY Group’s CEO, John Banfield, established a powerful leadership team and specialist partner network. A transformation strategy, placing people - customers, partners, staff - at the centre was adopted. Tobias were engaged to define, test and rollout an innovation framework which drove commercial value from the core, generated new revenue streams and aligned with the culture transformation strategy and new ways of working. Leveraging HCD and a delivery framework based on the British Design Council’s Double Diamond, we launched a multi-tiered transformation program including three 14-week innovation sprints, to prove the value of the approach, establish new revenue streams and embed innovation.

Our partnership which has enabled design-led innovation presents clear and measurable value by protecting and growing core business (1.5m transactions a day, worth $1.3B) and creating brand new products, services and revenue streams. BPAY Group has launched four new, customer-driven, commercial ventures since 2016. We have embedded HCD methods and frameworks for repeated innovation sprints; amplified the Group’s reputation and brand equity by involving new and existing partners in the innovation process; building internal design and innovation capability; internally adopting design methods, which have driven operational and service improvements.

Driving Strategic Alignment Supporting the strategic objective of developing an innovative culture, we consulted and advised on which innovation framework to adopt. Together we framed an initial 14-week experiment to explore the effectiveness of the proposed methodology and its fit with the BPAY Group culture. Engagement We engaged people from across the organisation. Our trans-disciplinary approach involved a cross-section of the organisation including the Executive team, BA’s, Architects, Marketing team, Engineers and Product Managers. We involved them in research, synthesis, analysis, journey-mapping, co-design activities and usability testing. Storytelling and graphic facilitation removed ambiguity, connected insights with action and built awareness. We worked in the open to demonstrate the value of design thinking. Capability This took two forms: Project-based and Classroom learning. We designed a program which aligns with the typical way organisation maturity develops - low awareness and ad-hoc activities to highly coordinated, organisation-wide innovation. BPAY Group people were embedded within innovation sprints, playing a hands-on role. We ran our HCD Foundation course for an influential multi-disciplinary group. Participants experienced first hand the value of collaborative and creative problem-solving techniques and learned how to take an active role in bringing Human Centred Design (HCD) into their practice and to their teams.