Empathy And Co-Creation In Capital Markets Operations – Insights From The Field

Co-creation and empathy are fundamental principles of design thinking (DT) that enable teams to collaborate and solve user problems at pace. Cross- functional collaboration and deep understanding of end-users helps to break down barriers between organization silos, resulting in an aligned vision and more holistic, user-centered solutions. However, the geographically-dispersed nature of investment banks can make co-creation and empathy-building challenging. Remote access to end-users makes it dif cult to be immersed in their environment, and it is not always possible to instigate hands-on, face-to-face design workshops to foster co-creation. Leading DT projects in capital markets operations, we have observed that despite these constraints and limitations the mindset and its application as a methodology to deliver solution definition can have significant bene ts in an area of investment banking, which often lacks creativity, agility, and a user-centered mindset when defining strategic solutions. This paper provides an overview of the bene ts and challenges of applying DT in capital markets operations, based on two case studies from Tier-1 investment banks, where we applied the approach to run solution-definition projects over a 12-week period. We share our experiences as DT practitioners and provide recommendations for achieving effective co-creation and empathy-building in a challenging work environment that has a lot to bene t from these two aspects of DT, and the mindset in general.