What motivates you every week to do your job with 100% passion?
Learning and discovering. Working with GFT and its clients has given me the chance to learn (and continue learning) through my work. At GFT, we promote self-learning and investigation, and this is especially important in the innovation space. GFT are on the pinnacle of emerging technology, and we pride ourselves in being the first to experiment with new tech when we see potential.
Working continually with the most up-to-date tech regularly leads to more discovery and investigation, and focused innovation often stems from prolonged periods of experimentation and research. At GFT I have been lucky enough to be given all the tools one needs to investigate innovations (often working directly with our partners and clients), and I personally find that incredibly satisfying.
What is most important for the clients your work with day by day?
Working as an innovation specialist, the most important thing my clients want to know is the added value of the projects we deliver. At GFT, we take pride in not just innovating for innovation’s sake, but also ensuring there are clear benefits for our clients. To achieve this, we often hold workshops or meetings with them to analyse ideas jointly developed with our clients. We also run feasibility studies or joint investigations, or draft white papers together.
The team I work with also strikes the right balance between a ‘lean startup’ mentality on the one hand (using agile methods iteratively to validate concepts via PoCs) and, on the other, a deep understanding of traditional work flows and problematic areas (both in financial services and different realms of industry). This balance between understanding new technology and methodologies and understanding how our clients’ core business works is key to our success.
Our clients’ success is of the utmost importance to us, so ensuring that they complete successful projects with us is pivotal to our engagement as a partner.
How do you define innovation in the context of DLT & Blockchain?
In my experience, innovation often comes from analysing problems and resolving them. This is something that GFT actually does really well. We know our clients’ business (thanks to years of experience in their sector), so we can understand their business problems and create tailored solutions. Often it’s this expert analysis that acts as a catalyst to clients really appreciating all of their current problems and starting to work on new business models in order to resolve issues. The forward-thinking clients that adopt this approach are often much more successful than their competitors – on a number of fronts.
For me, innovation also revolves around experimentation and applying technology or business practices. It is important to be able to experiment with ideas and investigate things (otherwise new areas or trends may be overlooked). Despite this, you have to get things to the point where experimentation can be applied to a real-world scenario. Innovation can come in many surprising forms, and a great example of this is blockchain. For years, DLT was very much out of the public eye, but it now underpins real-world trading and settlement systems at major financial institutions. You need to remain open to the possible fields of application offered by different types of technology and their true potential to promote change.
