This is part of a series of posts inspired by CFSI’s Underbanked Financial Services Forum.  At the conference, attendees were asked to complete the sentence, “in the future, the underbanked marketplace will…” on a square button.

By special guest, Ailian Gan

If you are a relative newcomer to the financial services industry, as I am, you might have discovered that a lot of these company names sound the same. Bill-something. Cash-something. Something-something-credit. While I am a believer in making it clear to your customers what it is you do, I think it’s important these companies find better ways to distinguish themselves. Please get creative in how you deliver your services and how you brand your business. Look outside your category for inspiration.

Mark Jones, in his presentation of design thinking principles over at IDEO, noted that “your consumer’s experience begins well before they’ve stepped into your context.” As we design financial services, it is worth paying attention to analogous experiences in other parts of life that may be more familiar to consumers. Building on that familiarity can be a good way to get consumers to like a financial service. Jones offered a bunch of ideas that can probably be transported to any number of industries: OpenTable’s any-time reservation service, Zappo’s highly communicative and enthusiastic employees, and Comcast’s use of Twitter to handle customer service. Could your financial institution adopt any of these ideas?

It was very encouraging to hear Bertrand and Roy Sosa say that their Mango store drew inspiration from Apple stores. It would be great to see more of such (juicy) ideas. Next time we think about benchmarking, let’s not just focus on the best practices of our peers. Let’s also try to import some best practices from outside of our category.

(Ailian is our summer intern at Core Innovation Capital.  She’s a second year MBA student at Wharton)