Director, Financial Services

Come make an impact with us:

IDEO’s financial services practice focuses on three areas of work, which we call Portfolios. We are searching for a Portfolio Director to join our team and help shape a more human-centered and inclusive financial world and these three topics:

• Product, Service, and Experience Design: Established financial services companies are contending with the threat of younger, learner startups and corporate ventures that have digital embedded in their DNA. How might we help them center their customers/clients in their business by building design capabilities, not only digital delivery capabilities?
• Responsible Innovation: For those clients in the financial services industry that have already embraced experience design and design-led innovation as a strategy for differentiation and growth, how might we help them balance people, planet, and profit with the capabilities to do, teach, and scale?
• Decentralized Finance: DeFi presents a potential seismic disruption to our clients’ businesses. How might they reshape their competitive advantages as the foundational paradigms of financial services shift?

This is an opportunity to use your deep expertise in bringing financial products, services, and experiences to market, and the network you’ve built along the way, to help IDEO’s clients innovate, grow, and pursue systemic impact across financial services.

This role may be based in any one of our three US studios: Cambridge, Chicago, San Francisco, or remotely anywhere in the US or Canada. 

Why is this role important for IDEO’s work?

IDEO’s been designing more human-centered financial services for more than 20 years - from small ways to save, changing how in-person banking works, and building new offers and ventures. More than ever before, emerging technologies and changes in the way people and businesses think about money have the potential to reshape and remake the financial system, and we will participate and be a prominent voice in this.

You’ll be joining a national, multidisciplinary team of leaders who believe that the financial service industry has plenty of room to grow to become more human-centered and design-led. And, through that kind of transformation, there is an opportunity to make finance more equitable, inclusive, and meaningful to people’s lives. This role is critical to making that vision a reality, through proactively expanding the network of clients and partners we’re working with, to giving our clients the confidence that the work we deliver can be brought to market successfully, to helping to define creative excellence in the industry both inside and outside of IDEO. 

Once here you will:

• Shape and share our point of view on making financial services more human-centered and explore how we can unlock new paradigms and possibilities, our strategy for realizing these ambitions, and the stories of our impact.
• Own and collaborate in new client relationships and existing partnerships, framing new opportunities to realize impact with clients, and growing our collective network.
• Scope and guide design engagements to be both creatively fulfilling and successful in creating the intended outcomes in our client organizations. Grow and sustain key relationships that will help push the portfolio of impact. 
• Work with the leadership team, and hold shared accountability for revenue commitments, network health, and creative excellence.
• Inform IDEO’s capabilities to meet market needs, including collaborating with IDEO designers and leaders to deliver new products, services, and experiences. 
• Contribute to market research on latest trends in Financial Services that can have an impact on our clients or lead to engaging projects with prospects.
• Build an inclusive culture and community alongside the existing leadership team, leading and mentoring an extraordinarily talented community of people with a wide variety of creative backgrounds.