PwC’s Academy Sri Lanka helps NTB become more human-centric by applying design thinking

Leading private bank, Nations Trust Bank (NTB) which has built a reputation as a bank that offers innovative products and services to its customers, is following in the footsteps of certain Fortune 500 companies by adopting the design thinking and innovation concept with the help of PwC’s Academy Sri Lanka. 

A two-day intensive program organised by PwC’s Academy for the bank’s corporate management helped the staff gain a deeper understanding and also strengthen its human-centric approach to design and develop innovative and digital savvy products and services to suit the bank’s modern day 21st century customers. 

In the backdrop of corporate finance and financial services being disrupted by technology and endangered by the entry of FinTech firms, there is an unprecedented need for the financial sector including the banking industry to adopt innovative concepts such as design-thinking in an effort to offer relevant services and products if it is to continue to attract customers. 

Design thinking is a human-centred approach to innovation applied by Fortune 500 companies that integrates the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for overcoming business pain-points and sculpt to succeed. The concept brings in a range of benefits such as empowering employees by equipping them with the necessary knowledge and techniques, developing new solutions to compete in the fast changing markets, enabling people to collaborate effectively, integrating customer and business values with new technologies and also speeding up time to market new products and services. 

During the two-day program, PwC’s Academy helped participants build their capabilities to generate new ideas and ideate solutions, increase proactive initiative thinking, improve the bank’s services, processes and systems, and also develop relevant and lasting activities using different hands on mediums covering physical and digital. 

Design-thinking is a human-centred design methodology that provides a solution-based approach to solving problems.  It focuses on five core areas; employing empathy, leveraging collective expertise, focusing on the end user, solving real problems and continuous testing. 

In recent years, PwC’s Academy, which is the educational business arm of PwC Sri Lanka, has earned an important reputation among the corporate sector in Sri Lanka for offering cutting edge world class programs to help improve the knowledge, skills, competence and expertise among professionals across the finance and business world. The programs offered by PwC’s Academy is well-known for moving away from traditional workshop methods and offering participants a unique and effective teaching methodology where case studies, group activities are incorporated into the program.