SmartStream Technologies

SmartStream Air Design and User Experience as well as Product Development team is a diverse, distributed, multidisciplinary collective with a shared belief that the key to complex problems lies in simple and elegant solutions. With a mission to deliver user-centric and innovative tools in B2B space for capital markets, financial industry and corporations, it uses design thinking techniques and AI to empower users to focus on tasks that ultimately drive the clients’ success. The collective aims to make highly complex technology approachable. Through research and client engagement, thereby the focus is on user productivity, transparency of AI and, ultimately, liberating customers to reach their digital transformation, risk management and regulatory goals.

Interview with SmartStream Technologies

Red Dot: Why did you become a designer?
SmartStream Technologies: It’s about people. The SmartStream Air team uses design, innovation and latest technology to empower the people who use our tools to spend their time productively, on meaningful, engaging, analytical tasks. The key to digital transformation success does not lie within software and automation alone, it lies in empowering the users to do their best work that creates value and enables them to achieve their business goals.

What does design mean to you?
Design is solving a problem. The key to effective design solutions is to truly and fully understand the problem, once you have the full understanding of the problem, your creativity is set free to come up with the best solution. Working closely with our clients and understanding their needs and goals, in order to provide innovative, empowering solutions to their problems is what our team defines as design.

What makes your work unique?
Our strive to simplify and empower through the use of design and technology is what we believe makes the work stand out. We design for the problem, and we spend a great deal of time understanding the problem. This allows us to find elegant solutions that are usually difficult to achieve in B2B space. Value through empowering truly transformative projects, driven by uniquely human abilities that are supercharged with the use of AI.

Which target group would you like to address with your award-winning work?
SmartStream has been a long-term partner to the world’s top financial institutions, from capital markets, banking and asset managers to the fields of digital banking, payment and service providers, as well as corporations. The data reconciliation problem spans across numerous industries and the ever-growing regulatory pressures, market volatility and the race for the betterment of services make the problem ever more acute. SmartStream Air was created to be a fast, simple, innovative solution to a historically complex problem.

Please describe the concept of creativity against the background of your award-winning work.
The creativity behind the development of SmartStream Air manifests in breaking away from the status-quo of B2B financial industry software. Historically, the quality of the user experience has not been the focus of enterprise-level tools, especially within the back-office application space. We wanted to challenge this and create a tool that truly focused on users’ needs and goals. Simplicity, intuitiveness, and ease of adoption are the areas where we focused on creative freedom and the complete removal of what we see as outdated practices of the industry to create an outstanding experience of working on data reconciliations. Another important aspect of creativity in the project was ensuring AI decision transparency and trust-building. This required a multidisciplinary team to come together and work towards unique solutions in order to build user trust.