Empowering decision makers by simplifying Finance Design I Thinking

Making financial information easy to understand empowers decision makers who for long had to rely on us to explain complex financial matters. Often, though nicely looking, financial reports confuse us through a vast amount of numbers making it difficult to separate noise from relevant signals, supported by expert language. By doing so, we increase the dependency on our expertise. However, Finance does not need to be complex.

In Finance, we tend to like new digital dashboards, however, underestimate the importance of the context within which they are used - at home and at work. As most decisions are made in the operational field, the day to day context, team dynamics and individual psychological situation play an important role. Furthermore, we risk investing into reports and features that remain unused despite initial excitement when presented in out-of-context situations (like management board presentations). Even more, our brain's difficulty to deal with probabilities and time value in Finance adds to the need to better contextualize the representation of information itself, too. Plenty of books have been written on how our brain builds self-confirmative stories instead of accepting statistical calculus. Also, the way we present information just like the order of how we ask questions tremendously influence the answers we will get.

Our own belief-bias towards the objectivity of numbers completely overestimates the rationality with which we take decisions. It's the opposite, however. We lack diversity in our profession, as we are dominated by classic management trainees. Instead, we should hire more phychologists and sociologists to help us better connect psychological and social dimensions in our personal and business life. Using more social inquiry we can achieve more accurate insights about the actual cognitive, emotional and behavioral impact when being exposed to financial data in support of actual decision needs.

Design Thinking and user centricity helps us to better focus on and uncover users' and decision makers' context of decision making. In addition, combined with advanced technologies (such as eye-tracking) we can better identify how well we can focus on key information, follow a story lines and face on our biased interpretation of what we see. While in has been increasingly common in financial markets, corporate controlling can still learn a lot from latest UX tech advancements in presenting (financial) information appropriately and thus empower our users to make more independent, mature and sustainable decisions.

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As part of the Airbus Finance liquid Teams, the Airbus Finance Innovation Catalysts and #finLAB promote user centric innovation in Finance. #FinanceInnovationCatalysts@Airbus #finLAB #F-Drive #Finance of the Future #SimpliFI #MixedReality #UXFinance #LiquidTeams