If you ever needed a reality check if banking, and especially pension, is a low-interest subject, I’ve got a graph for you:

A separate pension account (EPK) was introduced earlier this year and was set to change 1.55 million Norwegians’ relationship to the pension they receive from their employer. The goal was to make everyone more aware of what we will end up with when we retire and make more active choices. The result so far has been that only 3,5% of the users have changed their preferences. The most straightforward reason is that people don’t care that much or that their employer’s deal is most favorable. 

I have another theory: the UX and information provided on norskpensjon.no, the bridge between all the pension providers in Norway, is incomprehensible. To this day, I have not met a person who has been on Norsk Pensjon’s pages without having a bunch of questions. And that is not optimal for one of the most crucial web pages of 2021.

Pension is a complex topic. Changes to your pension have the most significant effect the longer you are from retirement age. The younger you are, the more important the choice you make. And the less interesting it is to think about retirement. When this is a low-interest product in the first place, it is not optimal that the first thing you are met with when logged in is a wall of text informing you what you can do on the website. When you finally can see your options, they are impossible to understand:

But we’re not in the business of pointing at problems without providing a potential solution:

Last week we linked to Benedict Evans yearly report showing the scale of the cloud. But it is interesting also to see the distribution between the cloud infrastructure market: 

Microsoft Azure has had the upper hand within finance in Norway for years by providing data centers in Norway. This is starting to open more up, and in November DNB entered into a strategic three-year collaboration with Amazon Web Services to build on the AWS cloud.

We’ve talked a lot about NFTs over the last year. (If you’re new to the term Visual Capitalist has created a nice intro.) This week we came over a scientific report that has studied over 6 million NFT-trades and found that a few users are in the core of the market. The ten percent largest accounts have bought or sold 97% of the items (!?!). If that is not crazy enough for you Nike earlier this week purchased a virtual shoe company that makes NFTs and sneakers “for the metaverse.” Adidas is also jumping into the NFT train by launching a collaborative set of Adidas originals. I guess digital shoes are here to stay?

But it gets even crazier 🙈:

As we approach the end of the year and once again have been ordered to work from home, it can be helpful to reflect more on how we can work effectively as teams. Harvard Business Review has published 5 things high-performing teams do differently from others. One of these is surprisingly enough that they call each other more often. Yes! We’re talking about traditional phone calls that strengthen relationships and prevent misunderstanding, contributing to more fruitful interactions among teammates. Another finding is that high-performing teams give and receive appreciation more frequently. 

Marius Jones from NHH has in his doctoral thesis also found the opposite: that it’s good to ventilate and become angry at work. One of his findings is that the more we have to pull ourselves together and put a lid on our emotions at work, the greater the risk of burnout and frustration. The startup Dealflow, which provides a marketplace for equity-based public financing, has been a part of the study. They are very open about their feelings, which allows them to address problems early.

That’s well and good if your team is open and communicates often. But what to do if that’s not the case? Mikkel Dengsøe which leads the data science team at Monzo has written about experimentation as a company strategy and how they constantly are doing small experiments to adjust directions. This can be applied to end-user products but also to company culture.

We’re taking a break for the next two weeks. Apparently, your brain requires regular “downtime” — unstructured time with no goal in mind and no targeted focus of attention. Let’s take this as a reminder to enjoy this weird Christmas and relax!

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Marius Hauken, partner Stacc X