Design Meets Business Seminar

This seminar will be is about 'Design Meets Business': Shaping The Banks By Design, how design enhances customer experience through visual communication and spatial planning.

The guest speaker Mr. Bojan Blecic: Senior Vice President & Head of Experience Design, OCBC Bank, brings along with his 13 years of experience in enriching customer's experience through design. As the current Head of Experience Design at OCBC Bank, Bojan brought on any innovative initiatives that improved the customer's experience, and in the process reduced significant cost for the bank. Bojan sits on the executive committee of the Design Business Chamber Singapore (DBCS), the nation;s premier multidisciplinary design chamber.

He explained about the journey of his experience design in OCBC Bank. As head of experience design, his role is to guide his team of 10 Singaporean designers to improve everything that interacts with the consumer, from products and branches to even the fines details in administrative documents and forms.

He also did share his story of veering onto the path less known to architects. He said that after graduating from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in 1994, he worked as an architect in Berlin, Germany. After a few years, he returned to Zurich where he met his former schoolmates, and they started a business providing design services to architects such as artist's impressions. He stated that their business closed down after three years, which introduce and opened the door to the start of his career in banking. Before he leaving in 2009 and moved on to focus on customer experience, he was the head of usability at Swiss bank Credit Suisse in Zurich in 2000.

He said that somehow he come across a newspaper posting from "a bank in Singapore" that was looking for a head of customer experience. Then he decided to join the bank and moved to Singapore in 2010 to a country he totally unfamiliar with. He said that it was challenging in the beginning working in a new function in a bank that was trying to improve age-old processes.

Furthermore, he explained that the team was involved in redesigning several digital platforms, from Internet banking, the apps on iPad, the website of OCBC- he gave us an example of their project simplified it in such a way that from 20,000 pages of information as started and ended with 600. They managed to remove 19,400 pages of information after realized that very few customers were in need of it.

"Understanding the customer, how to connect and resonate with them, what they value and what motivates them in part of design job. The designer understands the customers," by Mr Bojan Blecic.