On this episode of Design Leader Insights, Alex chats with Jean-Baptiste Kaloya - Head of Product Design at Bpifrance. They discuss Jean-Baptiste's diverse experiences, from disassembling computers as a child to leading design at Bpifrance, a bank dedicated to empowering entrepreneurs. JB shares invaluable insights into the strategic role of design in enhancing user experiences, driving efficiency, and creating impactful solutions, offering a compelling narrative of how design intersects with technology and business to transform industries.
Alex Smith: Design Leader Insights is brought to you by Fuego UX. Fuego UX is a leading UX research, strategy, and design consultancy. Hey JB, thanks so much for joining the show today.
Jean-Baptiste Kaloya: Hi Alex, thank you so much for having me.
Alex Smith: Well sweet, yeah, I think to get started, if you could give us a little bit of context into your journey in UX and design, that'd be helpful.
Jean-Baptiste Kaloya: Sure, exactly. So I think, you know what, my probably first experience with design was like a while ago when I was 10 and I was disassembling computers and I think metaphorically, it's probably the first experience. It's very far from what I'm doing right now, but you know, disassembling computers, switching motherboards, hard drives in order to get something working at the end. And then after, I didn't actually do design studies. I studied, I have a master's degree in engineering, computer engineering. And after that, actually, I really started to, on my own really, to be very interested in first of all, UX and then after moving the intersection about UI and product design. And I actually, after my studies started to work mainly as a freelancer. So for a lot of various topics are from e-commerce to public sector, through also fashion and arts and most recently banks and fintechs to be around 2015, I also ran an early stage startup. That was an app that I designed. And I actually had the first vision of it. I developed it with it was the first version of Swift mobile app. And the goal of that was really to find trendy places around the world. So the use case is really you are outside, you are in a new city, you open the app and you find places that are popular and that are open nearby. It was a fun time. And it's extremely interesting to also run this, this startup, run this company until the really beginning of COVID when I was focused on, you know, all the clients, plus there was no actual business model behind. I mean, I couldn't find it. So it was a great experience.
Alex Smith: Travel kind of died then which sucks but let's switch gears to what you're up to now I think you're at BPI France, which works with Entrepreneurs and it's kind of like an incubator. I don't know help me understand what what it does and what it is?
Jean-Baptiste Kaloya: So today I'm the head of design at BPI France and what is BPI France is basically so it's a bank. And it has been created by the French presidency 10 years ago. And what we are doing is we are helping entrepreneurs. So we are focusing on the entire life cycle of entrepreneurs. So from, you know company creators, so a company that doesn't exist to a company that goes abroad. So that's the full spectrum of, you know, of the life of the entrepreneur and the thing that is interesting is we are a bank. So obviously we are financing we are helping with like loans, grants in print something like that but also we have beyond banking solutions. So we are helping entrepreneurs by connecting them together doing mentor mentoring solutions with them helping them to, you know, progress on, I don't know, like civil security, green transition topic that goes really beyond just like financial solutions, actually. And since it's half owned by the French state, we do have this, you know, really strong general interest mission. So we need, and we have this ability and and we demonstrate results to really enhance the country's, you know, economical fabric, produce more and more innovative companies and just be really kind of a toolbox for entrepreneurs.
Alex Smith: I imagine BPI has been around a while and then all of a sudden they realized they needed to digitize, which is what every bank ever needs to do still. So tell me about that and, and growing a team there to accomplish that.?
Jean-Baptiste Kaloya: I think it's so, so interesting because your relationship with banks and finance in general is intrinsically linked to, you know, your emotions. I mean, on the, you know, personal side, your finance can be stressful. It can be joyful. It can, you know something you can you can use to you know, go abroad or visit places or, you know, depending on your housing and your life in general. So it's, it's interesting to see that. And on the business side, it's the same thing. Plus, and you have your company, so you know what it is. I mean, it's hard to be an entrepreneur. You are often I mean, this, this is a real thing. The loneliness of entrepreneurs, the, you know, burdens, the financial stress also of, are you being able to pay your employees at the end of the month or to run your business? We are a bank, business bank, but the complexity we have is that we do not offer, we do not have credit cards. We do not have business accounts. So we do have like additional, you know, challenge of, you know, for example, drive recruiting behavior or, you know, have a, you know, scale our adoption of our product because we are only focused on the investment part and basically the financial part. So how do you get a loan? So basically what we focus today is how do we help our clients to access easily to, you know, funding solutions or beyond making solutions. Then after, when they can manage their, their, you know, their loan, so you are a founder, you can delegate to your CFO, your CFO can track, you know, in real time, your, you know, next monthly installments or things like that online and online make experience. And then after you can also access to, I was mentioning beyond banking solution, but we also have teams within the bank that creates podcasts, contents, studies for entrepreneurs, and we can distribute those contents. Also on a digital, you know, experience on it.
Alex Smith: JB yeah. We were both at Convey UX in Seattle and there was this talk by, oh, I think it was JPMC, JP Morgan Chase. And it was great talk. And one of his examples I think was the. And a similar space more like an yeah, I guess investment banking was an error that someone made because of a poorly designed interface in banking that cost the company 900 million, right? And you say that to like a CEO or CFO, they're like, yeah, I see the value of design, right? Like we need, we need to make sure that doesn't happen. So I guess when you talk about design as a strategic asset, is it? How do you sell that to the higher ups? Is it like, hey, there's massive risks here if we don't have simply designed product. Is it fear? Is it, is it fear based? Like we don't have the right design. All these transactions are going to get messed up and we're going to lose billions of euros. Or is it more like, do they understand the value. How do you, like, sell that to the company?
Jean-Baptiste Kaloya: It's a great, and I think the parallel is great. I mean, it's a real key challenge because, you know, as you mentioned, it's, you know, even internally, you need to prove the value of design. I really focus with them, with the team, on, you know, how we can really structure and go really deep into the, you know, the problem space. So we've met a lot of energy into like our research strategy. We need to understand what, you know, are the key you know, change behavior, pain points of entrepreneurs. And by doing that, and by really making, you know, those understanding precise and also really tangible, we also could focus on, you know, specific use cases. So for example, focusing on, you know, like revamping part of our experiences, for example, for our bankers that used to switch for, you know, from 10 or plus tools. So it was, you know, impacting a lead time. And so we can reduce, for example, those lead times to, you know, operator loan. And obviously we can translate that in yours, because it's, you know, you're getting your, your efficiency. And so those key really precise, you know challenges that also we were kind of fortunate to be able to communicate that, communicate that within the organization to say, okay, we understand that this is a real problem. That's the real problem. And we express ourselves in a really tangible way. And this is the way we can correct that. We derailed that. And then that's the impact with really precise metrics. So I think that's the first thing. Also, another thing that is really interesting is that our research helped us to also identify some new opportunities, new product experiences we could create. So we, we discovered at some point that SMB, so after COVID and they, they weren't, you know, they were in need of small loans and those small loans on the really, just to have, you know, in their cash flow management, just, just as a really express credit in a way. And the, when we discovered that in our research phase, We see that internally operating a loan for like 100K euro or 1 million takes the same time. So obviously it's not really interesting for us as a business, you know, standpoint. And we, we couldn't actually operate those few loans, you know, in a, you know, few days. I mean, it's not, even though we could do that for like one or two, it's not scalable. So we think about how we operate our credit. And so we created a platform that, and we really understood this idea of speed. And so we worked about how we could create a 100 percent online platform. So no banker behind it to operate credit. And so in, even in the design of the experience, everything is fast. So you write on the platform, you just enter your company name. We are doing a background analysis. You just, you know, answer a few questions and if you are eligible, you can move on to your own application from their own. The entire process has been digitalized. It takes probably around 10-15 minutes. During validating your identity, connecting your bank account so that we can, you know, accelerate the risk analysis. And if you match all, you know, the criterias, then you have your money five days, you know, after that. It's extremely fast. So by doing that, and, you know, telling that story that we identify, you know market segment where we weren't really, you know, present, we created experiences. And in terms of P&L, it has a huge impact on the bank business. This is a way also to you know, express the importance of design combined with product, you know, and tech. So even in those kinds of elements, you can really demonstrate and try to have like business, you know, precise design business KPI. And and, and also acculturate and advocate about what is design. You know, it's not about doing mockups and doing interfaces, it's about how you understand really precisely the, the behavior, the pain of your, your user, and you try to find solution and you iterate.
Alex Smith: Yeah. Well, JB, thank you so much for coming on today and sharing these insights. I really appreciate it.
Jean-Baptiste Kaloya: Oh, thank you so much to you. It was, it was great.