Ivan Vidovich, recently-appointed Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director of Papua New Guinea’s Kina Bank, speaks about the financial institution’s digital innovation strategy at the recent Innovation PNG 2025 conference in Port Moresby. We look at his top six keys to innovation.

Kina Bank’s Ivan Vidovich. Credit: BAI

1. Identify the problem you’re solving

“The most important question about digital innovation always comes back to the ‘why’. It’s a key question to keep asking yourself: why am I embarking on a strategy, or why am I doing this project? What does it mean for my customers? What ROI will be delivered?

“It leads you to the obvious question: What is the problem I’m actually solving?”

2. Consider the strategic risks

“As a bank, strategic risks could relate to changes in regulation, geopolitics, data trends, digital assets, currency, AI [Artificial Intelligence], digitisation in the workplace, the future of the workforce, and new forms of competition.

“When you are innovating, you need patience and understanding because things don’t always go to plan.”

“If you try to see more deeply, understand and interrogate your motivations, you can identify for yourself things that can mitigate fundamental strategic risks for your organisation.

“Then, you ask yourself, ‘How can we do business with strategic risk, rather than build a wall and insulate ourselves?’”

3. Involve the whole organisation

“Not all the answers lie with a board, the CEO or the management team. You’re only one person. You really need to look at the different parts of your organisation and try to get the whole organisation understanding and participating.

“It’s amazing what can be achieved when you start to harness collective intelligence.”

4. Know your limits

“Kina Bank from time to time has suffered from what I call ‘the eyes are bigger than your stomach’ risk, where just because you have a good idea and just because you think your customers are going to use it, it doesn’t mean you can implement it.

“I call it the two C’s: capability and capacity.

“We ask the question: Do we build this ourselves or do we find a partner who’s already done it?

“It’s a really critical strategic decision, because at first you think you want to own and control everything. That’s not necessarily a pathway to success.”

5. Have a growth mindset

“If you’re going to change an organisation – if it’s going to make a difference to the environment that you’re working in, to the people of the country that you operate in – you first need to be able to change yourself: people who have self-transformative practices are more likely to be successful in transforming an organisation.

“Looking ahead, I don’t think AI in Kina Bank or in the context of PNG should be about taking out jobs but about improving customer service and reducing risk. It might change people’s jobs and you might have to, as an organisation, think about retraining people for the future. And that’s exciting if you’ve got a growth mindset.”

6. Experiment, learn and be prepared for failure

“Success can be that you’ve learned what you set out to learn . In the case of a couple of our tech platforms that don’t have massive scale but have really interesting customer feedback, we’re learning something about the next iteration, or the next product.

“WhatsApp Banking for Kina Bank has been a really good example of not doing something because you think it’s going to go gangbusters but doing something because you’re going to learn.

“A relatively small number of our customers use it in its current form. And that’s okay, because we’re learning about the future of interactions through products and services like that.

“Our other one was we’re the first commercial bank in PNG to have a scalable Internet Payment Gateway. E-commerce is still quite nascent in PNG, but at some stage it’s going to take off.

“It is a good example of investing into a capability that you’re not sure exactly when it’s going to scale, but you’re pretty sure it’s going to be a thing. And when you are innovating, you need patience and understanding because things don’t always go to plan.”

Kina Bank CEO Ivan Vidovich was speaking with Andrew Wilkins, Publishing Director at Business Advantage International at the 2025 Innovation PNG Conference, held in Port Moresby on 27 & 28 March.