Design Team Aims to Create the Most Preferred Financial Group Through the Power of Design

Designers often join projects from the development phase after business and service directionality and requirement definitions have been established, but by then it’s hard to backtrack. We think it’s important to participate right from the early planning phase so that we can design not just the how of product or service delivery but the more fundamental question of what to deliver.

The designer’s job is to give shape to customer needs, and that means taking off your service provider hat to really think about what would be best for the customer. I believe that fusing that approach with SMBC’s values as a bank opens the way for a better result.

It’s important to visualize who will be using those functions and services, as well as how the user’s behavior will change and what emotional shift they will undergo as a consequence.

Taking advantage of the team’s tremendous diversity, I make a real effort not to assign fixed roles but rather to give everyone as much freedom as possible. Obviously, there are certain musts laid down by company policy, but I try to assign team members to projects very much based on what they can and also have the will to do.

I spent around 20 years working in various areas of design for a manufacturer, but I always thought it would be great to be directly involved in business policy, planning, development, and sales in a business unit rather than in R&D.

I’ve always had an interest in finance as a key element of civil and business infrastructure―in fact, I majored in social systems design in grad school, and the department I belonged to in my former job had co-created services with a financial institution. My other motivation for joining SMBC was that I wanted to be part of the great upheaval as Japan’s megabanks work out how to transform their business to deal with the rapid advance of digitalization.

I taught myself graphic design and built up a track record as a freelance designer. I got a job as a designer at an advertising agency in Singapore, but I crashed and burned almost immediately and had to come home. It was a crushing but pivotal moment in my career.

When I did some digging, I found that other designers on the team had the same sales background as me. The fact that there was someone already on board pursuing my dream career gave me the push to join SMBC.

Money is so important to so many people that it has a huge impact on society and on daily life. I also thought that it would be a great experience to work within a big organization with a strong design culture where designers can have active project involvement.

By scaling out its know-how, even a small team can lift the level of a huge corporate group. That ripple effect is hugely attractive.

To make SMBC’s services universally available, it’s important to ensure the web accessibility of digital services, which means considering people with visual or hearing impairments, for example. Redefining our rules for UI, etc., required a lot of discussion and a lot of design time, and even now we’re continuing to explore ways of building web accessibility rules into our design system.

I really feel that we’re working on a project together with the planners and developers. In the early planning stages, they will come to us designers for our ideas as a matter of course and we will naturally take ideas to them as well, with designers expected to play a significant role. Design proposals should embody the value that the design will create for users and the business, but it’s also important that, as part of that process, designers in particular envisage how society will change in the future.

It’s amazing that a major firm with such a long tradition retains such a vibrant, venture-like mindset and spirit of challenge. To my mind, it shows that the blood of the two companies from which SMBC originates still flows strongly through its veins: Sumitomo, which got its start as a copper smelting tech venture, and Mitsui, a business innovator that introduced the groundbreaking practice of cash sales at fixed prices in its kimono store.

I want to find ways to grow the pool of SMBC Group fans so that, amidst all the competition, people choose our services expressly because they’re SMBC Group services.

My goal is to support the SMBC Group in going beyond the bounds of banking and finance to become a recognized innovation leader.

I’m constantly exploring opportunities for our designers to be involved in areas beyond superficial design and to upgrade their skills so that they’re prepared for those opportunities―and I also welcome anyone with broad-ranging skills who wants to create SMBC Group fans and change society through the power of design to come join our design organization.

We’re constantly exchanging some form of value in our daily lives. Playing our part in shaping the infrastructure for that value exchange is a heavy responsibility, but it also means that our ideas can have major social impact, and that’s the best part of being involved in design for a financial institution. My aim is to use the groundwork laid by the business planners and designers who came before us to take SMBC Group’s presence to the next level.