Written by the TD Lab

TD Lab was created as an area of innovation within TD that could provide an outside-in perspective on how to be a successful part of the innovation economy—to help the bank understand where we can be different from what we do today, or in comparison to the rest of the industry. But, at its heart, the Lab is a service to the bank. Everything we do is to inform, advance, and support work being done across the enterprise: the Lab as an incubator for process, projects and emerging technologies with an eye to being faster, leaner and more efficient.

In order to achieve this innovation transformation, the Lab’s mandate is to build not only for code—but with a specific focus on constantly and critically testing hypotheses in tech, UX, business models, while providing strong insights on talent and culture. And as we’ve matured, we’ve iterated and improved every aspect of how we do things, so we’re constantly in step with technology’s rapid pace of change and how it might impact the interaction model.

[caption id="attachment_10568" align="alignright" width="225"]Kyryll Odobetskiy, Lead Designer at TD Lab Kyryll Odobetskiy, Lead Designer at TD Lab[/caption]

As a lean team of product designers and engineers, our current approach looks at exploration and experimentation through a mindset to build, measure and learn. This means starting our process by focusing on customer or business problems rather than solutions, and taking a structured approach through a lean methodology—to favour experimentation over elaborate planning, and agile delivery over traditional, long-pipeline projects.

Our projects range from quick explorations around new features, to deep dives into complex problems that require intimately knowing customer goals and pain points. The combination of design and engineering working closely together allows us to bring concepts to life quickly, and when needed, power them with real data to get the most accurate insights from employees and customers.

As a lead designer, Kyryll Odobetskiy helps envision and influence how design can deliver unique experiences, working closely with customers to create solutions that enable them to feel more empowered when it comes to their finances and financial well-being.

The results are both seen and unseen. The output of our work can range from research to inform on the potential of an emerging technology as we did with the HoloLens, to one of the more than 150 prototypes we’ve developed—aspects of which have influenced product roadmaps or have been integrated into existing TD external applications, to launching the bank’s first public test app, TD Family Allowance that we co-developed with customers.

Ultimately, each day is about exploring new opportunities that will help deliver the bank of the future.

_TD Lab is one of Fluxible’s Platinum Sponsors. We are so ever grateful for their continued support to advance the design community. _