Fidelity International

How to turn ideas into the seed capital of success

THE PROBLEM

For almost half a century, Fidelity International has been helping clients achieve their long-term investment goals. Today, it is responsible for £316.4 billion worth of assets and provides world-class investment solutions and retirement expertise to 2.3 million clients. These clients include global institutions as well as individuals and their advisers across Asia Pacific, Europe, the Middle East and South America.

The company relies heavily on innovation to sharpen its competitive edge. It also regards internally-generated ideas as the vital seed capital of success.

However, ideas can be tricky to harvest effectively – often they don’t make it past a forgotten single Post-it note on a company awayday. Idea-capturing processes had proved slow, disjointed and too disparate. So, in early 2012, Fidelity International introduced a step change programme using SharePoint…

Initially, this proved very popular and attracted a strong following across the teams involved. But, very soon, it became the victim of its own success. When the process went viral, it just got bigger and more unmanageable. A strategic solution was clearly needed. But there were also other issues…

• One of the biggest challenges was to prioritise. A bottom-up approach to ideation attracts a mass of suggestions. The funnel was simply too wide. Fidelity urgently needed a new rigour – a filter to sift the really high-impact ideas from the less important ones.
• A flood of ideas was being fed into the system, but only a tiny trickle of benefit was coming out at the other end. To be viable, ideation must deliver efficiencies. Innovation has to be implemented. Fidelity needed to develop a better, faster, more effective way of turning inspired ideas into production realities.

THE SOLUTION

Conscious that Fidelity did not have the idea-capturing expertise internally, management searched outside the company and reviewed the best-of-breed ideation services – quickly narrowing the field to a handful of contenders and to their eventual choice, Wazoku:

“For us, Wazoku was the stand-out option,” explains David Cowland – director of Finance, Group and Oversight Technology at Fidelity International and a leader of RegTech initiatives. “We really liked their platform – it offered everything we needed, and then some. So, the decision was pretty unanimous and, from that moment, the project developed its own momentum.”

From the start, Fidelity adopted a very agile approach. Exploratory discussions were completed in September 2015 and a production version of ‘Idea Spotlight’ was online by December. Admittedly, though, it still took a while to work out how to fully exploit this accelerated process. Taking the sprint and marathon analogy, the company had successfully passed the 200-metre mark but the track was still going. There were many more corners ahead to negotiate – ideation is a hugely complicated game!

And one of the most complex issues was how to prioritise initiatives and focus efforts on the most promising and productive ideas…

“This was where the Wazoku team really proved their worth. They helped us to focus everything down to a series of ‘Challenges’ – twenty hot topic areas that make a real and lasting difference to our business”.

One typical challenge was to look at processes that were no longer needed. Systems and procedures that were redundant or even actually damaging to efficiency. This challenge attracted a lot of good ideas. Many got voted through for consideration. And at least half a dozen were given the green light…

“This is typical of the ideation process we have been pursuing since 2015 and the positive results that are being delivered. Admittedly, it’s not perfect. There are still issues and plenty of ‘work in progress’. But this is our third year of close partnership with Wazoku… and that rather speaks for itself.”

However, there remained one rather large ‘elephant in the room’…

Ideas without implementation are sterile concepts

There’s an old business adage: ‘it’s not the people with the best ideas that succeed – the winners are the people who implement them.’ Fidelity had numerous nascent ideas that weren’t fully formed or ready for investment. What’s more, the process for turning a promising concept into a productive outcome was sometimes challenging and difficult to deliver…

RegTech is a classic case in point. The increasing volume of complex legislation over the last 10 years has continued to create a challenging environment  for FS companies – particularly for global giants. Regulatory compliance is now an acute and costly headache. Many people, though, were convinced that RegTech could well be the ultimate aspirin. Indeed, for some while the compliance and regulatory teams at Fidelity had been looking at RegTech and how technology could resolve some of their issues. The prospect of shifting costly resources away from low-value, high-volume manual regulation towards the high-value, proactive management and influence of regulation was extremely beguiling.

But (and it’s a big but), realising this value could be seriously risky and expensive to develop in such a new, technically challenging area. How could RegTech – and a raft of other promising ideas – be forensically assessed and cost-effectively developed for global benefit? This question called for a change of mindset and a fresh approach to these issues. A new way of working – incorporating the best of design thinking and agile concepts – needed to be trialled within the compliance and regulatory teams.

It was at this point that Wazoku introduced Fidelity to a partner firm called Fluxx. Fluxx encourages large organisations to behave more like start-ups. Fluxx partners with clients to shape ideas and run experiments to test how people really behave when experiencing a simulation of the new product or service. Gathering evidence rather than opinion creates propositions that people love. And clients have a repeatable model for ‘test and learn’ innovation that can spread and transform organisations.

Fluxx recommended to Fidelity that they adopt a tool called RapidStart™ for capturing and incubating ideas. In parallel with the Wazoku ideas platform, Fluxx used RapidStart to surface, filter, prioritise and progress ideas in a completely new, agile way. The whole emphasis was on ‘less talk, more action’. Interestingly, there was also a much sharper focus on passion and commitment matched by evidence-based decision-making.

Twenty-eight fresh and potentially strong ideas were pitched at the outset of RapidStart. Three were carefully selected and, over the next 48 hours, they were intensively researched, tested and assessed with real customers.

The winning idea became known as ‘ClearSpace’ – a place for insightful discussions on compliance and regulatory matters. However, in the next 8 weeks, this concept was subjected to even greater scrutiny…

• Over 30 interviews were conducted to get a better appreciation of issues and to determine precisely when and why a problem becomes a priority worth solving.
• Then another 13 experiments were run to study a range of other factors – such as desirability, viability and feasibility – that also impact decision-taking in the ideation process.
• And finally, 3 pop-up events were staged across different Fidelity locations to include as many people as possible in co-creating solutions. This was a deliberate attempt to make idea labs real and relevant to everyone in Fidelity, right across the globe.

And there was one last unexpected twist to this case study. During the experimentation process for making the idea lab globally accessible, the Fluxx team discovered that an adapted version of the Wazoku platform could be the perfect vehicle for the first live version of the new ClearSpace platform. That was the serendipity moment when this story came full circle.

ClearSpace had graduated from a simple ideas-lab to becoming a living, self-sustaining solution to major business issues. This crucible for sharing insights had become the platform for distilling collective experience into best practice.

THE OUTCOMES & BENEFITS

Implementing a strategic platform has allowed Fidelity to fully embrace ideas generation and that commitment has proved contagious. People, at all levels, have seen that management is serious about this project – and they’ve bought into change.

There has been a surge in engagement and over 90% of people have now registered to go on the platform. That is an exceptional statistic. Why are people and departments so actively engaged? Because the challenges are real and relevant to everyone… the interface is simple and effortless… everyone is encouraged to participate… ideas can be quickly generated and assessed… comment is positively invited… and strong ideas will be seriously championed by leadership. While no platform, solution or new approach is perfect, the process is visible, configurable and empowering, and is ultimately a long journey that Fidelity is well along the path of.

People used to think that ideation was some strange alchemy performed by a remote department far from the mainstream of normal business. Innovation was something imposed from above; never inspired from below. Now they know differently. Innovation is everyone’s responsibility. Everyone can contribute. Everyone shapes the future.

“Effectively, we have taken ideas out of siloed departments and put them into the mainstream of global discussion. We have made incredible thinking available to all people. We have encouraged experimentation and fostered knowledge sharing. We have delivered a cultural shift and a substantial change in behaviours, mindsets and attitudes… many of the early doubters and cynics are now our greatest innovation champions. And as a happy by-product of all this, technology is now seen as an essential and embedded part of the business…

“That’s quite an achievement – and there is still much more to come.”