VHub Fileshare
industry sponsored project - summer 2020 - 5 weeks
The virtual innovation studio at UC emerged in light of COVID for students to generate solutions for industry partners through a fully-digital design sprint. I worked on a transdisciplinary team with six other students, their majors ranging from engineering, business, and design.
We were asked by Fifth-Third Bank to conduct research and define opportunity areas for leveraging 5G technology for commercial banking applications.
5G is the latest generation of cell tower technology. Our team first looked at the capabilities and limitations of this new cell infrastructure.
Lower data latency
Reduced load times / lag when communicating with networks
Higher data speeds
Download speeds will increase significantly
Greater data volume
Much higher capacity for data on cell networks
Short range, expensive
Tower range is much shorter than 4G - many costly new towers will need to be built
We then conducted interviews with the stakeholders at Fifth-Third involved in their commercial banking and product development divisions.
With this, we sought to better understand the commercial banking process, existing Fifth-Third products/services, their pain-points, and how familiar stakeholders were with with 5G technology.
Client relationships are crucial to build and maintain - ideally done over time and in-person
Many tasks still done in person due to security - proving to be a large roadblock due to COVID
More digital tools available for consumer banking than the commercial sector
Difficult to access big files and client info, especially on mobile
The entire team was involved in the research process - we documented data and gleaned insights using a “virtual whiteboard” via Mural. Here’s an example of how we discussed and analyzed interview data.
Using these insights, we began to infer opportunities for improvement, which then informed three rough concepts that incorporated 5G.
With feedback from the Innovation Team at Fifth-Third, we focused on refining two of the three concepts. The concept I primarily worked on was the Fifth-Third Virtual Hub (VHub).
VHub is a digital file-sharing platform and customer relationship manager tailored specifically to the needs of commercial bankers and their clients. It could initially be developed using existing 4G tech and could have features including
Video / chat - Intuitive file sharing - Portal of bank services - Digital signatures with biometric verification - Searchable client database
5G’s increased data bandwidth, paired with the decreasing price of hardware, will make VR more widespread and accessible than ever. VHub can also have a VR interface with new tools including
Full-scale virtual meeting rooms - 3D data visualization connected directly to bank documents - Virtual product demonstration tools - VR widgets for existing functions
