Abstract
This study explores how, under the trend of financial inclusion, designers can apply service design methods to embed human-centered thinking into fintech enterprises, thereby facilitating strategic transformation and guiding organizations to shift their focus from large enterprises to micro, small, and medium-sized businesses to achieve more inclusive services. Adopting an action research approach conducted over nine months and involving twenty-one cross-departmental meetings, the study found that designers visualized service breakdowns to initiate discussions and reveal organizational defensiveness and decision-making inertia. By mitigating commercial sensitivity to enhance focus and using data to strengthen organizational awareness, key issues were gradually incorporated into decision-making. Through co-creation workshops integrating multiple departmental perspectives, an MSME-oriented website information architecture was developed, increasing related content from 30% to 55%. Finally, the designer continued to validate and refine the outcomes, revealing the complexity of strategic transformation within organizational operations. Positioned as an empirical case of action research, this study demonstrates how designers leverage service design thinking to facilitate customer-oriented strategic dialogue within fintech enterprises, evolving from “insight providers” to “strategic facilitators.” It identifies five dynamic stages of designer intervention and three key competencies, highlighting that the essence of customer-oriented innovation lies not only in initiating actions but also in ensuring their continuity, embedding service design thinking within the organization as a sustainable strategic driver.
Keywords
Service design; Fin Tech; Strategic transformation; Financial Inclusion
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2025.744
Citation
Hsieh, C.,and Tang, H.(2025) How Designers Leverage Service Design to Catalyze Strategic Transformation: An Action Research on Third-Party Payment Enterprises Responding to Financial Inclusion Challenges, in Chang, C.-Y., and Hsu, Y. (eds.), IASDR 2025: Design Next, 02-05 December, Taiwan. https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2025.744
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
Track 10 - Design Practices & Impacts
How Designers Leverage Service Design to Catalyze Strategic Transformation: An Action Research on Third-Party Payment Enterprises Responding to Financial Inclusion Challenges
This study explores how, under the trend of financial inclusion, designers can apply service design methods to embed human-centered thinking into fintech enterprises, thereby facilitating strategic transformation and guiding organizations to shift their focus from large enterprises to micro, small, and medium-sized businesses to achieve more inclusive services. Adopting an action research approach conducted over nine months and involving twenty-one cross-departmental meetings, the study found that designers visualized service breakdowns to initiate discussions and reveal organizational defensiveness and decision-making inertia. By mitigating commercial sensitivity to enhance focus and using data to strengthen organizational awareness, key issues were gradually incorporated into decision-making. Through co-creation workshops integrating multiple departmental perspectives, an MSME-oriented website information architecture was developed, increasing related content from 30% to 55%. Finally, the designer continued to validate and refine the outcomes, revealing the complexity of strategic transformation within organizational operations. Positioned as an empirical case of action research, this study demonstrates how designers leverage service design thinking to facilitate customer-oriented strategic dialogue within fintech enterprises, evolving from “insight providers” to “strategic facilitators.” It identifies five dynamic stages of designer intervention and three key competencies, highlighting that the essence of customer-oriented innovation lies not only in initiating actions but also in ensuring their continuity, embedding service design thinking within the organization as a sustainable strategic driver.