Helping Spanish banking help small businesses

Opinno has organized a double tier project for a major Spanish bank. The outcome is a brand new banking platform designed to assist small and medium-sized businesses and support them as commercial entities with a product specially designed for their needs.

The initial stage of the project was to create a completely new type of financial product from scratch - one that would appeal to small businesses and their needs.

Opinno met with representatives from the bank to collaboratively envisage the kind of opening there was in different sectors of small and medium businesses for new banking services.

The ideal methodology for this kind of creative alchemy in business is derived from the way artists, architects and designers have always worked: in Design Thinking there is a brainstorming stage which, ideally, engages the right side of the brain so that the ideas pour out. What’s key here is to capture as many ideas in their purest form as they emanate from the brainstorming session, unfettered by past ideas or experiences in business. This stage is not focused on problem-solving, a business paradigm of the past, but on the new.

This innovative outflow comes after the empathy stage as the collaborative team is formed and reflects on the kinds of difficulties facing small and medium-sized businesses and their working capital. When the ideas begin to flow, certain concepts stand out and these are then developed further, according to the context of small businesses and their considerations as well as the priorities of our banking client.

The process then enters the product validation stage where the product is introduced to potential clients via the medium of interviews and user tests that are set up to evaluate the viability of the idea.

Once approved by our banking client, the real product is created. After the validation stage, we applied Lean Start-up business principles which are agile and iterative in the creation of a product that can be tested and reassessed in a cyclical process that both refines and reaches potential clients rapidly. Validation occurs naturally as an integral part of the cycle.

The result for our banking client was a validated financial product with immediate benefits that can be delivered quickly into client's hands: a financial platform for small to medium-sized businesses adapted to the financial realities of that business context.