At Fluro we have four core values: settle at brilliant, own your impact, build good, and experiment wildly (refine intently). Let’s talk about experiment wildly.
An introductory caveat
This isn’t an industry where you really want to open with wild experimentation. Not only is this a necessarily highly regulated space, but building our secure and reliable core infrastructure was the first and only priority when we started the business. Experimentation may have been an aspiration, but we had to build solid foundations before we could get into the juicy, revolutionary stuff.
Today, our foundations are strong, beautiful, and secure. Not only do we have a robust structure to support experimentation, we have the team, resources, and legacy to push innovation in the sector. Today, ‘experiment wildly’ is no longer an aspiration.
Safety goggles
It’s time to reveal a little secret, internally experiment wildly has a parenthetic clause: (refine intently). We left it out of the title because it isn’t as sexy and eye-catching as its counter.
To curb any concern as a financial company talking about wild experimentation, experimentation is the search for micro and macro improvements and innovation. Experiment wildlyis for us. It’s our laboratory with chemicals and jars and safety goggles. Refine intently, however, is a non-negotiable process before anything becomes consumer-facing.
To have innovation that becomes broadly adopted at an industry level, we have to experiment. We have to try and ‘fail’, internally, privately, safely, until we catch the proverbial lightning. For us, encouraging a culture of experimentation means celebrating any failure as a learning opportunity. Time spent learning is never time wasted.
We don’t only want to experiment wildly with industry-changing standards and technology. These are outstanding areas where we absolutely want to excel, which goes somewhat unsaid, but experiment wildly, as a Fluro value, applies to the entire team. It’s not only our sector impact, it’s our daily engagement with one another, it’s how our customer service team can improve every call, and it’s in the details of our design.
An example
Our first impactful experiment was real rates. Perhaps ‘experiment’ is a slightly duplicitous term, it wasn’t an experiment, it was a pioneering innovation we firmly believed the sector had to adopt in order to provide fair and not misleading rates to all consumers.
Real rates provide personalised APRs to individual consumers, circumventing representative APR (which only shows the highest rate 51% of consumers will be offered).
We vocally champion change at a regulatory level: remove archaic representative APR and make real rates the industry standard.
This is only the first step in our vision to positively and permanently change the credit industry.
Experiment wildly (refine intently)
Experiment wildly isn’t a wacky blue-sky approach for development. It’s an internalised ethos about potential and possibility. It’s a reminder that legacy isn’t always right. It’s a nudge to question if something is that way for the right reasons. It’s a push to do better and never be afraid to try something new, whether that’s how we build an analytics deck or a user journey. Experiment wildly has no hierarchy, great ideas are great ideas, and we encourage everyone in the team to shout about their creative ideas: to own their impact.
Try new things. It’s the only way to move the needle. Celebrate creativity, celebrate the attempt, celebrate intention.
We can’t change an industry without changing the industry.
