Speaking to HotTopics at FinTECHTalents 2018, Pol Navarro, CDO, TSB outlines his views on agile, collaboration and customer-focused teams.

What does a productive culture look like?

I think that for me when we think about culture it all starts with a customer. Especially thinking about how we can design products and services for customers in a more connected way. With them so co-creating solutions with customers and making sure that the culture in the organization is working around the customer.

The second thing for me is the agility to deliver those solutions to customers. So how we can organize those meaningful solutions to customers in a more agile way.

Third is about collaboration. When you think about the speed of transformation and, what are the things that customers are expecting today, collaborating with other people will be crucial to deliver those solutions to the hands of our customers. I think that it’s about customer, agility and collaboration that can help make more a more productive culture in big organizations.

How can a productive culture be stimulated using technology?

When you think about customer, agility and collaboration, technology plays a critical role on all of them. We have technology that is changing customer expectations. That is critical because people are expecting things to happen in real time and when you design for customers make sure that you design with that element in mind. When you think about things like Deliveroo – where people click a button and food is delivered in minutes – you need to think about what that means for banking and how customer expectations have changed.

The second one is agility. We need to create new environments to work differently and play a critical role in terms of allowing people to work in a more collaborative way and even remotely. Technology is critical for changing ways of working.

And collaboration is the same, technology helps companies through embedding APIs and other technologies and new solutions for customers.

The UK has recorded stagnant productivity figures since 2007: how can these internal productivity strategies translate to affect macro-trends?

I think it’s all about the combination of technology and a skill I think that the more the technology will be evolving it will allow people to work completely differently. For me one of the ways to achieve productivity through technology is by amplifying people to do their job in a more productive way. If you think about artificial intelligence, robotics and all those things will allow people to work in a much more efficient way and will amplify people to do other things. For example, if you think about the call centre know you could have robots helping the people in your call centre to support customers in a more efficient way, using that technology to amplify how people work.

The things I think that technology is an enabler to become much more productive and to help people do their job. On the other side I think that technology will create so many opportunities. When you think about the new technologies that are coming around blockchain, artificial intelligent, robotics that will create a massive opportunity for new jobs and being able to create new industries that are relevant for a UK economy. I think that the government has been working in how to transform London one of the big hubs in the world in terms of artificial intelligence. How we can create new job opportunities thanks to those new technologies.

What is the one strategy the UK FinTech space should consider if it wants to maintain its globally leading position?

It’s all about thinking always about the customer and how to scale those solutions that are relevant for few customers to a big number of customers. We’re seeing many opportunity of collaboration between a smaller startups with very relevant solutions and using big banks to scale those solutions.

I think that if you are creating a FinTech company, think about going directly to a market, but at the same time create something that you can go to the market through big banks. Because that will enable you to grow faster and to get on a scale with less time and less therefore than trying to go directly to the market without that collaboration.