People's Choice aims to keep pace with fintechs by focusing on culture

People's Choice Credit Union is hoping to keep pace with others in the financial services space, including fintechs and those already governed by the Consumer Data Right (CDR), by pulling culture to the top of its transformation priorities list.

Speaking at Salesforce World Tour Reimagined last week, People's Choice digital and technology programs transformation lead Sean Cummins said the organisation started by developing a strategy focused on the target operating model.

He said this was focused on putting members "at the heart of everything we do" before looking at the digital and technology side of things.

"It was a conscious decision to put the operating model first and make sure that we could actually focus on that and certainly not lose focus as we start to do a lot of the more technical implementation," he said.

This also included defining lines of accountability and making sure its culture was aligned.

People's Choice turned to Salesforce for help, not just with implementing its tech, but also for advice from the giant on what has worked within other organisations.

See also: How Salesforce is making Einstein Voice a customizable voice assistant for today's mobile workers and data-hungry businesses (TechRepublic)

"We looked at our border competencies [that] we need in the business because we are looking at that whole business transformation. It's not just the technology," he said.

"And we worked with Salesforce to develop a competency metamodel which mapped some of those technical capabilities into the people competencies."

As a result, People's Choice is also heading down the My Trailhead path to deliver curriculums that Cummins hopes will engage staff and develop competencies which feed into the organisation's broader operating model.

Salesforce describes My Trailhead as a platform that creates a cycle of reskilling and upskilling employees within an organisation.

"Culture is an incredibly important part of that," Cummins added. "We have a really strong culture, both in the community and internally with our staff, and we're really focused on maintaining that, and growing that, and we continually ask ourselves questions around culture, as we're changing.

"So as we see change in the teams, we need to keep our finger on the pulse of culture, make sure we're always supporting and making sure that we continue to drive a high-performance culture, which is what we're focused on."

Cummins said separating the credit union's underlying technology and member experience has allowed for greater flexibility.

"When we're talking about the experience, we want to also be flexible in what that is … consumer expectation, that's changing by the minute," he said.

"You've got great stuff happening [in the industry], fintechs popping up left, right, and centre delivering new experiences out to the market and we're really trying to keep pace with that."

"We want to respond in real time to feedback, we want to innovate," he added.

On finding the balance between trust and good customer experience, Cummins said ultimately what can happen when focusing too much on trust is an experience riddled with friction.

"When you're trying to build a lot of trust into that application, it can come in quite heavy. it can be really intrusive on the experience," he explained.

"You might make it totally secure, but so secure that you can't use it, so the frictionless experience from a security perspective is really what we're designing for.

Touching on the CDR, Cummins said that as the data marketplace expands and data is able to be consumed more readily by all providers, having a system People's Choice trusts will prove to be very useful.

"We are continually looking at consent, identity, and that frictionless experience in everything we do," he said.

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