Eftpos taps culture-of-innovation-as-a-service

Despite being Australia’s most used debit network, eftpos is fending off accelerated decline in its transaction volumes and market share.

The company – wholly owned by 18 members including Commonwealth Bank of Australia, ANZ, National Australia Bank, Coles and Woolworths – is pinning its future success, in part, on mobile payments. Eftpos is currently busy working to enable eftpos payments via mobile wallets and handsets, using a number of technology solutions. The first is expected to be available later this year.

But achieving that aim requires getting the membership to first understand and then champion eftpos’ mobile proposition.

“We needed to create an engaging, interactive, and high quality digital sales kit, for use with our members to educate and convince them to become advocates for mobile payments and that eftpos not only had the right technical solution but that we also had the capability and expertise to deliver,” explains Leanne Collier, head of services at eftpos Australia.

To help turn the complex topic into a convincing message, Collier and her team turned to ideation platform Ikabo (previously known as RoadMap).

“This tool gave our staff permission to innovate,” she says.

Giving it a Squiz

Ikabo was launched as a subsidiary of global technology and strategy business Squiz last month. Collier had already used the product while working on a similar project at the NSW Department of Industry where she was senior strategist.

The tool – Ikabo Incubator – is a cloud-based technology which provides a simple user interface through which employees engage, contribute and collaborate to solve business challenges they set themselves.

Managers view and prioritise ideas, and then allocate resources to put ideas into action in a 90 day time frame which works, Ikabo says, by “fostering momentum driven change”.

“The staged and structured approach enables a level of tangibility to be created around the innovation process, which traditionally seems ambiguous to most people,” Collier explains. “It also helped everyone understand that innovate you need to collaborate and consider ideas from different perspectives to really understand an issue, and I think that the tool really helped drive that level of cultural change that we were aiming for.

“Additionally, the tool and process also assisted in breaking down silos across the department, opinions were treated equally and as valuable as each other, regardless of where you sat structurally in the department, organisation structure became invisible.”

Other customers include Griffith University, The University of Adelaide and the Department of Communication and the Arts. In many cases, the incubator product is paired with a training programme aimed at fostering innovation.

Used internally, Collier said eftpos is now considering opening Ikabo up to members as a collaboration platform.

“Eftpos is a relatively new business which is focused on building core capability in digital and Industry centralised services,” she said. “Once we move to the next stage of maturity, eftpos will consider the value the incubator product could deliver in supporting the product development process, specifically, increasing the level of engagement and open collaboration across its membership base to drive outcomes not possible in one on one discussions.”