Also this week:

• ❤️‍🔥 The power of making CTAs more specific

• 👨‍💻 The new normal: a hybrid workspace

• 😎 The mafia hires good accountants

• 💩 Don't shine the turd

🆔 What if KYC was stored in an identity hub?

Do you know all the same questions you have to regularly answer and check off when you become a customer in a bank? What if that data was stored in your identity layer? In Norway, that would mean that BankID kept your KYC information and that you could authorize this documentation to the bank during onboarding, rather than having to go through the whole data entry thing. I first heard about the idea from Simon Taylor in Fintech Brain Food, and it instantly made sense.

For a bank, the process of collecting enough customer information in the shortest possible time is essential. Torvald Kvamme from Bulder Bank states that they continuously work to balance risk and efficiency. With an identity hub, onboarding and regular checkups for different banks could be quicker, and the data collection would be more uniform. An identity hub would also dramatically improve things like a change of address since the identity hub could "push" that to a compatible bank. Why should every bank collect the same data but in a slightly different way?

The key here, according to a survey Forrester Consulting has carried out for Experian, is to communicate the benefit for the customers if they share their data. 53% answered that they trust their bank more than their employer and society in the survey.

❤️‍🔥 The power of making CTAs more specific

"Built for Mars" has a useful write-up on banking UX where he compares the overdraft feature of Starling and Monzo and highlights a few things that we can all learn from them. One technique, which Monzo executes brilliantly, is to hide content behind specific actions selectively. Another one is that the more precise the label, the more confident the user can be in the action they are about to perform:

The above quote pairs nicely with Carly Ayre's blog post on how software is automating design. What does that mean for designers? A main point in this article is that user-focused design means repeatedly asking why — why this, why now, why this way. This responsibility shouldn't (and can't?) be automated. But software enables designers to spend less time entrenched in minor, aesthetic decisions and technical implementation, thereby assuming larger responsibilities within product teams.

👨‍💻 The new normal: a hybrid workspace

The last round of forced home office is over in Norway, but do developers want to return to the office? According to a new survey done by Kode24, the answer is both yes and no. 95 percent think that home office becomes too much every day, but the majority want to work from home a few days a week (50%). That is in stark contrast to a survey done by Samsung in the financial sector in the US. In the survey, more than half of employees who can do their jobs from home wanted to continue telecommuting even after the pandemic is entirely over. Either way, we need to facilitate a hybrid workspace in the years to come.

In their latest survey Sintef Digital has done at Sparebank 1 Utvikling, they found that digital and physical meetings provided the same value, but that new employees and managers are those who prefer physical meetings. However, Sintef found that there is a real difference in experienced utility between planned and non-planned meetings: The most valuable meetings are not planned. Ninety percent believed that unplanned meetings are experienced as useful most of the time. Think about that the next time you are scheduling a daily standup.

😎 The mafia hires good accountants

You can study many things, but some studies are more amusing than others: This study investigated if the mafia hires good accountants. Their finding was that firms serviced by accountants with connections in organized crime groups have higher quality audited financial statements than a control group.

💩 Don't shine the turd

As we approach a new week, a great reminder: Don't shine the turd!

That's it for this week 👋

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Marius Hauken, partner Stacc X