Digital – Divider or Equalizer?

#WFM #digitaldivide #digitalfinancialservices #digitallending #digitalpayments #HCD #payments #lending #digitalbanking #banking #advisory #strategy

In keeping with Bridge DFS’s Human Centered Design (HCD) approach to financial services, we are always inquisitive and eager to know more about the trends that are shaping our industry as well as the larger context of the society that we serve. Which brings into focus work-from-home or WFM. We’d like to hear more from you about the subject.

WFM has mitigated some workplace issues. Gender, race, education, origin and age related biases for example. Social media, on the other hand has exacerbated divisiveness. Even more, the gulf between the digital natives and the rest has hugely widened. Even while digital natives have become more closely aligned.

Investors have responded strongly. Zoom, Docusign, Dropbox, Slack, Amazon, Snowflake, Apple, Microsoft, Upwork are just a very small sample of the businesses whose trajectories reflect the confidence in the future of the digital workplace. But the unsung heroes of the pandemic are from professions that have not benefited as much from digitization – patient care, sanitation and waste removal, public transit, utilities, shipping. The list is long.

As much as digitization has positively impacted digitally savvy economies, the lack of it has brutally pushed back many others that struggle to catch up.

So what are your thoughts – divider or equalizer or both?

At Bridge DFS (www.bridgeto.us) we focus on designing digital journeys in the area of financial services – payments, lending and money management. We base our work on several decades of practitioners’ expertise in digital financial services coupled with the Ideo-based Human Centered Design (HCD) methodology.