Innovation Mixtape: Recent Episodes
Alex Nuth
Welcome to Innovation Mixtape, a custom series produced for Omers by Now or Never Ventures.
We believe that changing a company from the outside is hard. That’s why we have found a collection of gurus, pioneers and creatives to help us explore market changing and innovative ideas within pensions, AgeTech, and building ventures. You’ll hear from executives at Standard Life, some of the most creative agencies in the world and leaders who have built game changing ventures.
HESTA pensions are based in Australia and has over 850,000 customers. They are known for being innovative and customer centric. In this episode they will be talking about their approach to innovation, value measurement and evolving their member approach.
Frazer is currently a Digital Product Manager at PayMe (HSBC). PayMe is a mobile payment service from HSBC, currently available for Hong Kong users with local phone numbers and banks. Users can pay businesses, transfer money to one another using a mobile app, linked to their credit card or (any local) bank account.
He is a determined, innovative individual with an analytical mind and a passion for excellence. Frazer is vision-driven and results-focused with a proven track record of high achievement.
Greg is an experienced financial services leader with a record of driving large digital transformation programmes in the likes of Transamerica and now at City National Bank.
Greg began his career in sales and marketing, before going on to lead Transamerica’s thought leadership programme exploring partnerships with the likes of the MIT AgeLab.
As Head of Digital Platforms for Transamerica, he was responsible for the vision, design and deployment of the company's customer, employer and advisor digital experiences. Greg also led the company's Retirement marketing team and provided strategic direction for employer and plan participant communications. His work has been at the heart of a digital and brand transformation for Transamerica.
About Henry & Simon
Henry is another one of the illustrious Market Gravity alumni. Henry is a man passionate about financial services innovation, there is barely an investment or credit card proposition he doesn’t have an opinion on.
After a short sabbatical, Henry recently joined 11:FS as one of their venture leads, and is bringing along Simon who can give you a bit more of the history and story behind the business. Simon is also the co-founder and Blockchain practice Lead at 11:FS, and has been immersed in the technology of financial services for as long as he’s been working. He is consistently voted one of the most influential people in Banking, Insurance and Fintech by banks, his peers and a number of industry bodies.
Why 11:FS?
Everyone in financial services innovation has an opinion on 11:FS, for better or worse. However what is indisputable is that they are a company with real opinions on their industry, how it needs to change and pioneer that message. Few consultancies can live up to their content creation and how that has galvanised many of the best minds in the industry.
11:FS have worked with many established financial services companies to help them create digital challenger propositions, at the same time as being involved in projects with neobanks around the world seeking to create the Monzo of
About Nadeem
Nadeem and his brother started a company called Airpost that was acquired by Box in 2015. They then built their AI and machine learning team having no technical background. They also spent quite a bit of time doing development work in places like Bangladesh with the Grameen Bank, building ECD's in Tajikistan, helping build a $500m university in Kyrgyzstan, projects in East Africa, Honduras etc... Driving large scale impact was always very important to them and there were 3 problems that we wanted to solve:
1) Affordable housing, 2) Food production, 3) Access to diagnostics and drugs
They felt like there was a massive infrastructure piece missing. If they solved one of these problems, what about the hundreds of others impacting million of people, the education system is completely backwards. They decided to leave everything to solve that problem, which became The Knowledge Society (TKS).
Why Nadeem and TKS?
TKS focuses on training young people on emerging tech like AI, Genomics, Quantum Computing, Nanotech etc... as tools to solve important problems in the world. Their students are starting companies and raising money from people like Sam Altman and Naval, getting paid internships at companies like Microsoft / IBM as young as 14, and working on Masters / PhD level projects using emerging tech in as little as 4 months in the program.
Nadeem is hugely passionate about TKS and their purpose to transform the education system, ensuring a new generation of leaders and doers that will change how things get imagined and delivered in the future.
About Kaisie
Kaisie Rayner joined Scottish Widows, part of Lloyds Banking Group in 2017 to lead the implementation of a Responsible Investment Framework for Scottish Widows, a subsidiary company one of the UK’s largest DC pension providers.
Since joining she has been evangelical about the need to integrate and embed Environmental, Social & Governance risk analysis across the organisation. She is passionate about enabling the transition to a low carbon economy, determined to save the world one pension at a time.
Previously, Kaisie was part of the team at AEGON that delivered Retiready, a new D2C retirement platform designed to help get the average Brit ready for the retirement they imagined.
Why Kaisie and Scottish Widows?
We know Kaisie from working together at AEGON, a big Dutch investments company with a presence in the UK. Iain and Kaisie worked together on Retiready, AEGON’s effort to create a direct to consumer retirement platform solving for the challenges faced by most Brits being wholly unprepared to fund their retirement expectations. Lots of good things happened here, some things could have been better and we hope you’ll find Kaisie’s insights helpful.
Now Kaisie is with Scottish Widows with an inspiring brief on sustainability. Kaisie is passionate about the impact big investment companies can have on our future through where their money is put to work. Kaisie also sits on the Edinburgh Climate Change Commission.
About Will
As a former editor and entrepreneur, Will’s experience working with Asian finance and technology leaders positions him to connect the dots between Asian Fintech firms and the rest of the world.
Will has been based in Asia for many years, primarily working as a content creator and editor for a range of financial services, publications and events companies.
Why Will & Money 20/20?
Money 20/20 is one of the world’s biggest Fintech events, typically taking place in Europe, the US and Singapore attracting leaders from large financial services companies, fintechs and investors. At these events, bankers, investors, innovators and entrepreneurs typically share the latest innovations, products and opportunities for investment and collaboration.
About Dan
Dan runs the Innovation team at TAL, Australia’s leading Life Insurer, and has been at the frontline of corporate innovation for over 15 years, working with some of the world’s largest companies to drive growth.
Dan’s experience covers projects across a range of industries including leveraging shopping basket data at Tesco, launching the Smart Homes venture at British Gas, and establishing the emerging technology incubator at TAL. Dan is a thought leader and published author of The Secrets of Big Business Innovation, with deep expertise in customer-led design and delivering innovation with a real commercial value by leveraging data and technology.
Why Dan and TAL?
TAL are one of Australia’s leading life insurance specialists and for over 140 years, we’ve been protecting people and their things, insuring more than 4 million Australians and their families, helping them look after what matters most, so they have the freedom to keep living the life they planned.
TAL are one of Australia’s most innovative big businesses, with a track record of delivering many new products and features to market as part of a steady and sustained digital transformation process spanning the best part of a decade.
About Nick
Nick is perhaps the only person to have run an innovation lab within a major bank, a government agency, a circus, a life and pensions company, an opera house and a global media brand. He brings that experience to bear in his approach to projects which combine genuinely fresh thinking on strategy together with ruthless focus on delivery. Nick formerly ran Market Gravity in the UK, and was Deloitte’s innovation lead for financial services.
Why Label Ventures?
Label Ventures is a network of the world’s most pioneering innovation studios, bringing together strategy, design and technology pioneers from around the world to take on business and society’s biggest challenges.
Label operates a bit like a record label. At the heart of each collaboration you’ll find our team of producers who only turn up to work each day to make something new.
Founded in late 2019, Label are already working with some of the UK and Canada’s biggest businesses, and some disruptive misfits on big ambitious challenges from financial services, to entertainment, retail and travel.
David is the Head of Retail Marketing at Virgin Money, and former Head of Innovation for Clydesdale Yorkshire Bank where he led the development of a new digital bank, B, which went on to become the core experience at the heart of the Virgin Money customer proposition once it was acquired by Clydesdale Bank.
David played a lead role in the design, development and delivery of the B proposition and brand, re-inventing CYBG from a very traditional regional bank, into a business fit for the digital age, as well as being the driving force behind the development of new physical branch locations such as Studio B and B Works, reimagining banking on the high street.
Several years ago, nobody would have envisaged Clydesdale Yorkshire Bank acquiring Virgin Money. CYBG was a old, legacy bank with an aging and rural customer base until they created B, a new digital banking proposition designed around a new, youthful and more urban demographic. This transformation gave the right to play to acquire one of the more cult like British brands, that could be applied to a proposition that could substantiate it.
Craig is the co-founder and business development director for Filament PD, a product design studio based in Glasgow. Craig graduated from the Glasgow School of Art after studying product design engineering. Craig founded Filament PD as a studio that could uniquely bridge the gap between business strategy and pushing the boundaries of physical products.
We think Filament PD already has an idea that OMERS should explore, called Nest Egg. They’ve created a physical savings proposition designed for kids to engage with money in a world that has become more and more digital. We think this would be a really interesting way for OMERS members to engage their kids and families in money specific to the critical roles that many of them fulfill.
AltaML conceptualize, develop, and commercialize ML software products. AltaML partners with organizations using a co-development model where they provide technical and strategic expertise to build transformative applications using applied AI/ML. They start first and foremost with the business use-case with a focus on ROI and building new competitive advantages.
AltaML is particularly interesting given their track record of success with AIMCO in Alberta, where many use cases and concepts will likely have already have been identified that can be applied to a similar organization like OMERS.
Join GrandHood founders Jon & Mattias as they share more about their innovative organization as well as their approach to solving problems in the pension industry.
Grant is a provocateur, he’s known for taking a different point of view, challenging the norms and legacy way of doing things, before often creating bold new products that look and feel completely different to what came before them.
About Grant:
“I’m a guy who likes to play around with stuff. I’ve always mucked around with thing like simple electronic circuits and lego when I was a kid, just making “stuff”. I did a degree in Economics then worked in an investment bank for a few months. It wasn’t for me so I quit and picked up a bar job. When not pulling pints I taught myself to code in order to “make stuff” on the internet. That’s how I’ve continued with NEU. The only difference is that the “stuff” now has a purpose.”
Join Ian Greenhill, founder of Studio Something, a creative agency in Scotland as he asks simple questions about pensions, customer experiences and more.
A conversation with Steve Gatenby about his leadership in innovation at Barclays and the Co-Op. He talks about how to make innovation work within large organizations, from creating new supporting processes to building buy-in by solving real company problems.
A candid conversation with Scott Liddell of Standard Life. He shares his experience and thoughts on topics ranging from deeply understanding customer problems to some of the issues innovation teams face to specific areas of opportunity within personal financial management.