Top 10 Fintech Innovation Labs | 6: Legal & General
In May’s edition of FinTech Magazine, we counted down our top 10 fintech innovation labs, in at number 6 is Legal & General
When FinTech magazine spoke with Maarten Ectors, CIO at L&G, in our December 2019 issue, he explained that the company’s innovation team was focused on solving ‘Harry Potter’ problems - those which require a ‘magic touch’ in order to solve.
“Have a Harry Potter Problem? A critical business problem which others weren’t able to solve. Take it to the innovators that can bring a magic wand by using new technologies and business approaches to solve your problem faster, cheaper and award-winning.”
- Maarten Ectors, Chief Innovation Officer, Legal & General
Exemplifying the ‘startup’ mindset that innovation labs are renowned for, L&G maintains a fast and flexible approach to some of the most complex enterprise system problems in the financial services and insurance industries, earning a reputation for its pioneering solutions. Achieving this requires a thorough understanding of the latest technologies and the best ways to implement them, something L&G excels at.
Can a 180+ year-old company be a fast innovator?
“Yes. Innovation is an attitude that you can easily teach to business, technical and support functions. Innovation, and our Harry Potter Problem approach is all about mindset. I joined L&G from a technology background. When it came to innovating, I’d previously formed startup-like groups, within which we would take specific problems or a new technology like cloud computing, create specialised teams and focus solely on those problems for weeks to come up with a solution. You don’t know what will happen after that time, and it’s a case of ‘you either do this and you do it well, or you don’t’. We never allowed ourselves a big budget, which means you can’t approach things in the normal way, and so have to find a way to make things work. This is the type of thinking we now embrace at L&G.”
- Maarten Ectors, Chief Innovation Officer, Legal & General
To find out more about Legal & General’s innovation, you can read the full article and exclusive interview from December 2019’s issue of FinTech Magazine here.