Supun King-Jayawardana, head of Commonwealth Bank of Australia’s London innovation lab, explains to Joy Macknight the orientation to the UK fintech community. 

Supun King-Jayawardana embedded

Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) is putting down roots in London’s financial technology (fintech) scene, and officially opened the doors to its innovation lab on September 8. The launch occurred the same day that the Australian bank announced a partnership with Barclays to deliver cross-border peer-to-peer transfers, enabled by interoperability between the two banks’ mobile apps – effectively illustrating the collaborative potential of being based in the City.

CBA picked London as the site for its third innovation lab, following Sydney (2014) and Hong Kong (earlier in 2016), because of the dynamic fintech community but also its geographic location. “As a bank that prides itself on being open to change and embracing innovation, and while recognising that Sydney is up and coming in the fintech world, the reality is that Australia is in bed at this moment,” says Supun King-Jayawardana, who was part of the team that set up the first lab and moved to London six months ago to head up the most recent one.

He calls this material reality a “tyranny of distance”, which is a challenge to effectively plugging into such a quickly evolving scene. “It makes a difference to have on-the-ground capability to say whether a particular start-up, partner bank or academic can help solve problems for our group,” he explains.

Mr King-Jayawardana stresses the Australian bank’s credentials. “CBA is a top 10 bank in the world, well funded and open to running experiments. If they work here, then we can scale them in Australia,” he says. While the bank’s European headquarters is based in London, housing the institutional and asset management businesses, it has no retail presence in the region. Consequently, the London lab is mainly working on innovations to help the bank maintain a technology lead cross all business lines in its home market some 17,000 kilometres away.

Culture change

In addition to being immersed in a vibrant ecosystem, the lab has two further aims relating to the bank’s view that innovation is part of everyone’s job. One objective is to create an environment to test new ideas and run experiments, not only with external organisations but also staff.

The second objective is to instigate cultural change within the organisation. “We want our staff to understand customer-centric design and lean start-up methodology,” he says. “Beyond the physical space of the lab, we run programmes on how to think innovatively. This helps us get buy-in from business, as well as find internal sponsors and champions for each project.”

For example, the lab runs a programme called CANapult, which is a physical can that is sent to an employee with an idea. It contains a stack of tools to help them define, test and pitch their idea over a three-month period. In this way they have skin in the game and learn something in the process, according to Mr King-Jayawardana.

It also runs an 'intrapreneur' programme, which brings employees together into teams. This year the winning team is London based and designed a new retail product for the Australian market. “We helped them with the structure and processes, and they then pitched their idea to the CBA board. It is a great way to empower people and also ensure that a culture change is spreading across our global centres,” he says.

In addition, CBA is looking at areas that maybe are not 'sexy' but focus on reducing operational costs, for example exploring a new way of doing email. “When you say fintech, everyone thinks it has to be something they don’t understand. It doesn’t have to be that way,” says Mr King-Jayawardana. For the email project, the bank is using the London business as an incubator. “If it works here in a controlled environment, then we can see whether it works in Australia or Asia,” he adds.

London goals

Mr King-Jayawardana is clear that the London space is not a technology lab. “While emerging technology projects will be run here, it is not about being a blockchain lab, for example,” he says. There is a distributed ledger interactive display in the lab, used mainly for educational purposes.

Nor is it an accelerator. The bank has good relationships with Level 39, Innovate Finance, Barclays Accelerator and Accenture fintech hub, among others. Instead CBA aims to be a corporate partner. “We can provide start-ups with data and the ability to experiment and test,” says Mr King-Jayawardana. 

The bank’s London innovation lab is here to stay, he emphasises. Currently it has five projects in motion but it is still early days. “In the next year-and-a-half, we plan to have completed meaningful experiments for our group, supported the culture of innovation across CBA’s London business and ensured that we have demonstrated to this community that CBA is a global innovation leader,” says King-Jayawardana. “That includes running events, attending external events and being part of the ecosystem. That is what success looks like.”

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