Today was my last day in the world of banking. I'm about to begin a new adventure next week as Chief Design Officer at a Fortune 10 company (more on that next week!), and a new chapter begins tomorrow for Design at Lloyds Banking Group.
After three years of demonstrating the transformative power of elevating simplicity, humanity and empathy through Design, the Chief Design Office is joining forces with the Chief Customer Office. This combined group will bring together the adjacent surface areas of user experience, branding, marketing and communications to ensure that the mission of Helping Britain Prosper will be even more tangibly felt by businesses and households across the UK.
As I look back on the last three years, I am in awe of a team that has helped raise NPS (a measure of trust) by an order of magnitude, deepened LBG's position as the UK's largest digital bank, uncovered a completely new metaphor to connect people with money in intuitive ways, innovated alongside Silicon Valley partners to make giant leaps in our ability to iterate and adapt, trained executives in Design Thinking and Empathy, brought in extraordinary talent across the industry, developed the industry's most sophisticated design maturity model, and created a powerful movement around Societal Design that goes beyond accessibility and inclusivity to consider the deeper implications of design on all pockets of society (particularly those left behind and excluded).
I can no longer speak for the team, and will let future work speak for itself, but I will close this chapter by thanking Zaka Mian for having the vision to bring Design into the heart of one of Europe's largest tech-transformations, Catherine Kehoe for stepping up into a broader role to champion Design alongside Branding and Marketing, and every LBG associate who had the patience to consider new ways of creative working, teach me a new language of banking and British idioms (bits and bobs!), have the creative confidence to break free of left-brain-only thinking, and continues to champion the Design team's manifesto of helping people end the day just a bit better than it started when it comes to their money, their relationships, and the moments in life that really matter.