User Experience Design and Digital Marketing are careers that rarely know the intricacies involved in the specialized world of Financial Management.
Christopher Marx has a unique familiarity with the financial world that is a rare and unique niche in the marketplace.
First he spent eight years creating digital assets, products, and experiences for a financial services solutions provider. At Invesco, solving complex challenges for financial industry leaders was a daily occurrence. During that time, the changes to the financial industry were drastic - from fin-tech to blockchain, the markets of today look very different from a decade ago.
Then more recently he spent another year with the Federal Reserve Bank, helping enable cash liquidity to the financial industry. At the Fed, digital products and services helped the financial industry and everyday consumers alike.
Working at the Fed in 2022-23 when the FOMC raised the interest rates 8 times in a year to combat inflation was a unique experience. Also, working for an S&P 500 company that managed over $1.2 trillion dollars of the world's assets, the numbers were large. Supporting one of the world's most popular financial instruments, the QQQ ETF fund, the stakes were high. Yet when every day brings new challenges, the excitement of creating solutions to better people's lives never gets old.
Data and the pipes the data travels through, those are the backbone of the modern financial markets. When microprocessors get smaller and faster each year, then displaying, formatting, rendering or charting that complex data is an ever growing challenge. There is a human aspect to data visualization that goes beyond what PCs, Bloomberg terminals, mobile devices, IoT devices or recent emergence of supposed AI can handle by themselves.
The human factor is vital in this digital tech world, and must come earlier and earlier to program machines to act on our behalf. When the human factor is key to buying or selling, those experiences must be straightforward yet robust. How does a tech novice become a fluent user? Or how does the occasional user become a power user? Designing user experiences for who customers are today and who we want to help them become, that is the ongoing passion of a financial UX designer.
The financial industry is historically slow to adopt technology. From the Wall Street trading floor, to the last industry holdouts keeping Blackberry alive, the only person wearing a suit on a hot day is going to be a financial industry poster-child. When the Nasdaq is already all electronic, and the top global companies are all in the tech industry, the person predicting "what's next" may not be the one with the CFA Charter on the wall of their office. A UX designer who knows the financial industry has a unique perspective on how to get ahead of the competition.
Once upon a time...