How Does A Financial Service Institution Innovate To Serve The Military?

If you’re looking for hotbeds of financial innovation, financial institutions are among the last places those in the fintech crowd would list. However, some institutions serve customer bases whose specific needs necessitate innovative solutions.

That’s where USAA’s chief innovation officer Zach Gipson comes in. USAA’s customer base is heavily employed by the armed forces, and it’s Gipson’s job to oversee the various emerging technologies that the firm is developing to serve its military clients.

“It’s not in our nature to go out and talk about what we do, so we were probably known better for innovation [among our partners and customers] than the media,” Gipson said in an interview with Benzinga. So, what kinds of products does USAA keep close to its chest?

The Challenges Of A Military Customer Base

Serving military customers presents a unique challenge — service members are regularly on the move. Many soldiers and sailors shuffle from station to station throughout the United States and abroad every three to four years, and of course travel across the globe for deployments or tours in one of America’s many theaters.

“We created a whole separate mobile channel and experience for our members who are out on ships in the ocean and only have low-bandwidth internet,” said Gipson. “In that environment, typical pageloads weren’t loading in time. If you’re on a ship and only have 15 minutes on the computer, you have got to get in, take care of business and get off. Technology has been a huge enabler of our ability to connect with our members when they’re moving within the U.S. or abroad on land or sea.”

Making Banking Accessible

One reality of serving the armed forces in wartime is that the horrors of combat leave many service members incapacitated. Over fifteen years of war have injured thousands of veterans and service members, and many financial services applications aren’t inclusive of the differently abled.

That’s why USAA employees came up with ideas to allow injured veterans to access digital banking and allow visually impaired members to deposit checks using voice-guided features on their mobile devices, said Gipson.

USAA employees pitched those ideas through a crowdsourced program that allows staff to submit concepts to an online portal. Employees from across the company can vote on which ideas are best, and management will consider the top ideas for potential USAA products or strategies, said Gipson.

“We had 94 percent of our employees participate in our employee innovation program and put over 1,200 employee ideas to market last year — a full ten percent of all submitted ideas,” Gipson said. “Our employees care so much about our members and mission, and it’s evident in their participation in the idea submission process.”

A Culture Of Service

Gipson rounded out the interview by highlighting the service culture USAA instills in its employees.

“If you’re a USAA customer, you get the same excellent service whether you’re a 19-year-old enlisted service member, a retired general or even a senior executive at USAA,” Gipson said. “We deliver that level of service because our members deserve it.”