Sometimes, ideas take time to be considered.
J.P. Morgan
Industry:
Financial Services
My role:
Lead designer and workshop facilitator
Timeline:
2008–2010 (treasury application design), 2018 (future vision workshop)
In 2008, while designing JP Morgan's treasury application, it wasn't clear to me what problems were were trying to solve.
The project lead wasn't intereseted in ethnographic reasearch; he just wanted his vision brought to life. We were allowed to conduct usability testing and that's when I was able to ask questions. Their answers revealed patterns and possibilities that the project scope wouldn't allow me to explore. So I filed them away.
The future of cash
Ten years later, I was asked to faciltate a workshop to expore the "future of cash management". I was excited to share the solutions I had dreamt up years earlier, and are now supported by technologies that were finally mature enough to implement.
Optimizing cash
What if every dollar actively maximized its earning potential? Systems that continuously monitor balances, intelligently match funds to the highest-yield accounts, and proactively guide managers to smarter, more profitable decisions.
Proactive notifications
Instead of multiple manual steps to authorize payments, what if the system notified users of upcoming payments and displayed qualifying accounts automatically?
Voice Interaction
What if cash managers could work effectively away from their desks? Voice interfaces combined with natural language processing could coordinate tasks outside the traditional UI—boosting productivity and accessibility.
Automated issue resolution
What if the application could identify missing credits, locate contacts, reach out, and document correspondence in one streamlined process?
Forecast accuracy though machine learning
What if systems could help managers understand positions, forecast more accurately, and reconcile faster by identifying the transactions responsible for variance?
These scenarios workshopped were solutions to problems I'd observed years earlier—now supported by technologies that were finally mature enough to build them.
Even in 2019, the technologies I outlined in the workshop seemed like a large undertaking: AI-driven optimization, voice interfaces, predictive analytics. Today, they are standard expectations in enterprise software. No matter how they chose to work with these recommendations, I brought the foresight to make sure they were prepared for the future.
