Usman Sheikh

Profile Highlights

Disruptive Change Maker.

Usman has a proven track-record of developing and leading design and innovation teams that leverage market and behavioural intelligence, cutting-edge technologies and a human-centric approach to developing the next generation of financial experiences.

15+ Years of Cross-domain FS Experience

Usman has extensive experience leading design and innovation teams at some of the largest FSIs and consultancies, across most FS domains.

Hands-on Practitioner

Usman has over 25 years of experience as a human-centered Design practitioner, with expert-level skills in research and experience design.

Team & Capability Leadership

Usman has founded, scaled and managed various cross-discipline design teams at major financial organisations and digital consultancies.

Design Thinking & Sprint Expertise

Usman is an expert in Design Thinking and has extensive experience of running highly collaborative design sprints for new product development and validation.

Thought Leadership & Public Speaking

Being recognised as a founding member of the Global Design Leaders Community, Usman regularly writes and speaks about the cutting edge of AI, Innovation and Design.

Storytelling & Media Management

Usman specialises in effective storytelling and his past work in payments innovation has led to active press and media engagements.

FinTech Ecosystem Experience

As an early member of Barclays Rise, Usman has significant experience of working with and mentoring FinTechs across various levels of maturity.

Start-up Business Strategy

With an MBA (Entrepreneurship) and two successful start-ups under his belt, Usman has a strong understanding of business strategy and key start-up challenges.

FinTech Case Studies

Human-centric approach to developing next-generation of financial experiences

Usman has extensive experience of collaborating and co-creating new products and experiences, that solve real world problems across various industry sectors with cutting-edge FinTech solutions.

Dine & Dash

Streamlined invisible payments experience for the hospitality sector

Co-created with Prezzo Labs, Dine & Dash allows customers to check-in to a restaurant with a single tap of their smartphone - this 'tap' recognises their location, identity and their payment credentials, allowing them to 'simply walk-away' at the end of their dining experience, with their bill settled invisibly in the background.

Grab+Go

Cashier-less shopping for fast-moving retail environments

Co-created with ISS, Grab+Go was the first of its kind retail experience (though commonly available in most supermarkets now!) where a customer could simply pick, scan and pay an item using their smartphone, completely bypassing the need to queue at a checkout.

Invoice+

Digital invoice payments for analogue services

Co-created with Barclaycard Germany, for the German market where invoice-based payments are still the consumer preference. Invoice+ enabled consumers to pay their analogue and digital invoices, securely on the move with their stored payment credentials, completely removing the need for bank transfers and cheque payments.

MobileVend

Connected mobile payments without dedicated payment hardware

Co-created with Coca-Cola, MobileVend allowed consumers to connect with thousands of vending machines, make multi-item purchases and pay using their digital wallets - without the need for any dedicated payment hardware in the vending machines. Saving vendors millions in retrofitting costs.

Career

Design Leadership

Usman has held executive-level design leadership roles in some of the largest financial organisations in the UK, enabling deep experience in not only strategic capability development and growth but also complex stakeholder management.

2009

Experience Design
Leadership

2013

Head of Customer Experience

2015

Senior Director of Innovation & Design

2020

Executive Director of Innovation & Design

Executive Leader of Strategic Design for Financial Services.