People Spotlight: GBST's Head of Digital helps combat financial illiteracy

To celebrate Wear it Purple Day this year, we thought what better a time to introduce Brianna Dobing! She is GBST’s appointed sponsor for Diversity & Inclusion, and as the Head of Digital, also manages our Digital business operations and an incredible team of experts. Empowering people to understand and manage their finances is an important part of why Bri works at GBST.

How long have you been at GBST and what is your role?  

I’ve been at GBST for five years. I started in the Digital team as an Account Manager, then two years ago, stepped into the Head of Digital role. This role is a mixture of everything, which is what I like, as no two days are the same! I am responsible for core business functions including sales and customer acquisition, financial management and reporting, marketing, and product direction.

Why is your role meaningful to you? 

I like how technology has improved the way we engage with financial services, so everyone can feel empowered to understand and manage their finances. Across Australia there is widespread financial illiteracy. Nationally one in three adult men and one in two adult women don’t understand key financial literacy concepts, and these statistics get worse if you are if you are in an underrepresented group. In the UK, 39% of adults (20.3 million) don’t feel confident managing their money. The technology we develop and implement helps the customers of financial services organisations to better understand their financial situation and make more informed decisions. To me, that’s really important.

What kind of products and services are offered by your Digital team?  

We offer two core products; Equate and DXP. Equate is a suite of financial calculators and tools that can easily be embedded on a website, app or portal to give users a better snapshot of their financial situation. They answer questions like “How much can I borrow from the bank to buy a home?” and “How much will I have in my super when I retire?”.

DXP is our ‘Digital Experience Platform’ and it’s a robust content management system (CMS) that enhances customer experience and can integrate into any third-party system to control content. We’ve recently hooked DXP and Equate up, so our Equate clients can now login to DXP to manage and configure the content in their tools and calculators. We also have an amazing design and UX team that works internally on product led design as well as externally with clients to solve customer pain points in UX.

Tell us more about Equate!  

Equate offers a series of 31 tools and calculators covering lending, wealth, and insurance. For the financial services organisations that use them, they benefit from building client engagement, improving lead quality and better conversion rates. For users, they get to find out their borrowing power for a loan, how much monthly repayments might cost on their home loan and how to save for long-term prosperity. Equate has been designed to integrate within client processes, such as home loan lending applications or onboarding journeys, where leads can be passed directly to CRM software.

Who uses Equate?  

There are more than 100 clients using our Equate tools and calculators. Most are in Australia and New Zealand, but this year, we expanded to North America and now have a growing client base in the US and Canada as well. We’ve also expanded Equate into the UK, so now our calculators can enable another geography of users to understand things like the costs of purchasing a first home, compare different loan scenarios based on income, expenses, and current portfolio, or understand how much interest they could earn in a fixed term savings account.    

Why did you take on the role of D&I sponsor? 

I’m passionate about building diverse and inclusive teams. I think all people should feel safe to be their most authentic selves at work, and if I can help support that in any way, I want to. Our tools and calculators are used by a very broad and diverse audience, and my involvement with the D&I team contributes to insights and ideas within product development.

What does the D&I sponsor role entail? 

GBST is actively looking to raise awareness and drive progress of D&I within our workplace. We know diverse and inclusive teams spur innovation and deliver better outcomes. The D&I sponsor’s role is to support People & Culture in their HR workplan and to bring as many authentic voices as possible to the table, to ensure that the policies and strategic initiatives that the company puts forward are representative of the people in the organisation. We’ve started doing this by setting up our own working group, as I am aware my perspective alone is limited.

What does Diversity and Inclusion mean to you in the workplace? 

Diversity to me means representation of all peoples of different sex, cultures, abilities, disabilities, sexuality. I want to be sitting in a meeting room and for me to see this diversity at the table. Inclusion to me means people feel seen, heard, and are respected. People have a sense of belonging and there is psychological safety in the workplace for people to truly be themselves to their fullest potential.

What would you like to accomplish as the D&I Sponsor this year? 

I’d like to increase our D&I maturity, publish a “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at GBST” statement, to set the tone of D&I at GBST, understand who our people are, to ensure what we promote around D&I is meaningful for GBST employees, understand how people view the topics of D&I, so we can build an incredible work culture, and uplift our D&I capability, to build D&I champions at GBST.

GBST’s interactive online tools and calculators are used by more than 100 financial services organisations and millions of their customers in Australia, New Zealand, the UK, the United States, and Canada. The GBST Digital team works with financial services clients worldwide to improve brand reputation, build brand advocacy, and enhance online customer journeys, engagement, and acquisition. GBST’s customer experience experts create bespoke digital solutions for financial institutions from calculators to portals, apps, content management systems, and more.

Posted in: Diversity & Inclusion, GBST Digital, Wealth Management Administration