Global Market Infrastructures (GMI) is an internal service within a multinational investment bank that procures and manages the network of 3rd party banking services in foreign markets. Clients such as financial services, banks, investment management firms, corporates and governments utilise the multinational investment bank’s GMI network to access a new market through a single point of contact.

An Inventory Manager tool will provide a ‘single source of truth’ and transparency on all GMI activity and market relationships (FMUs), providing huge time-saving efficiencies. With greater efficiencies in place, GMI roles and capabilities would be more fully enabled to focus on adding greater value to the team.

Defining the scope & vision

Purpose

Short term, GMI struggle to systematically provide timely requests for information and data about market relationships with colleagues and regulators.

Long term, in order to improve the value returned to the wider business, GMI need to offer a holistic, centralised service including enhanced market intelligence individually tailored to audience needs.

Vision

An inventory manager tool. A ‘single source of truth’ on all GMI (global market infrastructures) activity and market relationships (FMUs).

A Market intelligence dashboard. Enabling market managers to focus on identifying trends and delivering intelligence and insight which pro-actively improve market and client relationships.

Audience

• Market managers
• Network service delivery
• Network client consulting
• Other functional partners

Goals

• Improve efficiency by lowering GMI cost to serve.
• Improved knowledge transparency
• GMI viewed as centre of excellence

Workflow mapping with stakeholders

To help us understand the complexity of the problem we were trying to solve we interviewed several stakeholders and started mapping out the journey from the perspective of three users, an IM User (Inventory Manager User), Market Manager and a GMI User.

The needs of each of these users were very different, an IM User would typically use the IM management tool on a daily basis to maintain the accuracy of the relationship and report on key metrics, whilst Market Managers will use the tool on a monthly basis to validate the relationships for which they are responsible. Meanwhile, other stakeholders (GMI Users) within the multinational investment bank would be able to view, filter and export relationship data whenever needed.

Facilitating idea generation workshops

Now that we had a complete, holistic view of the journey, we were ready to start some small scale investigative research and co-design workshops with stakeholders from around the business to explore a broad range of ideas.

Bringing our ideas to life

Our solution was heavily influenced by modern analytical software where the amount of information being presented on any one page is boiled down to avoid cognitive overload on the user.

The use of white space, coloured labelling and attributable search simplifies the complex nature of the data and enhances usability.

Before validating our ideas with the business we needed to ensure that the content was accurate, the UI was consistent with their brand identity and all of the elements on the prototype were clickable.

We wanted to make our prototype feel like a live piece of software so that our stakeholders would behave and examine it’s usability more realistically whereas a prototype with lower fidelity would be more unpredictable thus giving us more skewed feedback.

Validating our prototype with stakeholders

Once we were confident in our solution we needed to share our prototype with the same stakeholders that we had originally interviewed from around the business to ensure usability and desirability.

What’s more, we needed to validate the technical feasibility with the client’s technology partner to ensure that what we had designed was possible to deliver.

The results