The hottest Trend in Banking is the use of Design Thinking to transform banking services.

Capital One’s CEO felt a sense of urgency that all of his employees be trained on the fundamentals of human centered-design. But how might one introduce Human Centered Design to one of the largest retail banks in the USA?

If the one product you’re known for is ubiquitous, how can you stop your customers from leaving for other banks?

For Capital One, the answer was a small laboratory within the larger bank. The group leading this innovative push calls themselves Capital One Labs, and their secret weapon is free coffee.

In our recent design thinking survey, one of the most difficult things respondents found about design thinking was integrating it into their corporations. When not supported from the CEO on down, design thinking is unlikely to create real change for a corporation and this manifests itself in many ways as we saw from the survey.