Kunal spoke about balancing the need for innovation with staying true to Morningstar’s original legacy:
For us, having a clear mission and using the mission as the way that we're guided, I think ultimately helps us be relevant. It is no less relevant today to say that we're trying to demystify investing and empower individuals than it was when I walked in here 25 years ago. In fact, the world is even more complicated today. And so our ability to do that and to do it through great design, through the use of technology and to put amazing research on top of it, I think is as relevant as ever.
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TRANSCRIPT
Kevin Bethune
Welcome to The Design of Business,
Dana Arnett
The Business of Design.
Kevin Bethune
Where we talk with leaders in their fields,
Dana Arnett
About how innovation, access, and curiosity are redesigning their worlds. I'm Dana Arnett.
Kevin Bethune
And I'm Kevin Bethune.
Dana Arnett
This episode of The Design of Business | The Business of Design is brought to you by Morningstar.
Kevin Bethune
People don't just want financial information. They need to be able to understand it and use it. At Morningstar, great design transforms the way investors interact with financial data. Deeper insights, more personalized strategies, broader definitions of success — start your journey at Morningstar.com.
Dana Arnett
On today's episode, a legacy of innovation and investment.
Kunal Kapoor
I mean, we're all creatures of habit, and so part of the role of design is to help maybe evolve how we think about those habits.
Kevin Bethune
Kunal Kapoor is Chief Executive Officer of Morningstar.
Dana Arnett
Which, as you just heard, is our sponsor this season. Kunal, Happy New Year and welcome to the podcast.
Kunal Kapoor
Happy New Year, guys, and thanks for having me.
Kevin Bethune
Thank you. And we're very sorry we missed you during our last visit back in September to the Morningstar headquarters to celebrate our new partnership between Morningstar and Design Observer.
Kunal Kapoor
Yeah, we're very excited about it, and thanks for giving us the opportunity.
Kevin Bethune
Oh, great. We are too and great to have the privilege of speaking with you now. So Kunal, let's start at the very, very beginning. While some might find their affinity for business by taking that first economics class in college, you were drawn to the numbers early on by studying horse racing, as I understand it. Can you tell us a bit more about that early inspiration?
Kunal Kapoor
You've done your research. I don't get asked that question often, thank God, actually. But yeah, no, as a as a as a kid growing up, my dad had an interest in going to the races. And so I used to see the book, the racing form or whatever it was called in those days laying around. And I used to pick names. And it turns out that sometimes it's good to be lucky because those names actually did pretty well. And then I actually started looking at what was in there, and it was this dense amount of information and it just kind of fascinated me. And I started to just play around with it at a very, very young age. I think I probably was somewhere around 10, 11, 12 years old. And of course, the things go once you actually do the work and analysis it turns out I was better at picking the names and actually looking at the data.
Kevin Bethune
Incredible.
Kunal Kapoor
My record and interest in horse racing went done quickly because I realized I didn't like losing money either, which is a good thing to learn early in your life.
Dana Arnett
From those early days of discovery and intrigue. I also know that Morningstar was your first job out of college. Can you talk a little bit about what the company was like when you first started here and what you were hired to do?
Kunal Kapoor
Yeah, and actually, I'll take a step back, even. I discovered Morningstar really in college and, you know, the internet was just getting started in those days. And Morningstar was early in having a website and I had kind of gotten this interest in finance, but I was kind of drawn to Morningstar because of what I've often talked about as "the Voice", and it's sort of this unique, accessible voice. And part of that accessibility is purely through the fact that we try not to make financial data daunting, right. When I look around me in college, so many people were not interested and I was sort of an anomaly and I thought that that was kind of a thing that would persist through college. But the realities, even through life, come to a sort of notice that a lot of people are not as interested in finance and because it's so daunting for them. And one of the beautiful things about Morningstar and one of the reasons I was drawn to it was it sort of changed that equation with this notion of design, technology and research kind of coming together. And even at a young age, it really sort of spoke to me and demystified something that seemed far more complicated than it ultimately was. And so when I landed here, we were around 200 people, I think just around 30-ish million in revenue. I think everyone except for Joe Mansueto, our founder and executive chairman here at Morningstar, probably under 25 years old in those days. And so it's funny to think back to the nineties. It was still a small firm by any measure. Today you might even have it called a startup given the size. But we didn't feel that way. But certainly we were hustling and everybody was wearing many hats and it was super fun. And when you're small, you learn fast and you're really close to your customers, and because you're doing multiple things, you really get a great appreciation, top to bottom, soup to nuts for the organization. And so when I got here, I was actually just entering data and I literally had to go to the fax machine and pull data off and enter it in. And if data was missing, I'd try to chase down people, call them up in those days and try to get the data from them. And it was hard. Like people would not always take your phone calls, but just got to be persistent and kind of go from there. So it was a really good learning experience right out of college.
Kevin Bethune
So what was it about Morningstar, whether it's culture or its structure as a business that has kept you there for well over two decades?
Kunal Kapoor
Yeah, it's it's all the things you mentioned, but it starts with the mission, right? These days, it's sort of become chic for firms to say they have a mission. But you talk to people and they write it on their walls or whatnot, but they don't remember it right. And to me, the mission is what I'm so proud of. And I often say to folks, right, like, we're helping our friends, our neighbors, our families, and that's great. That's something you want to kind of get up and be a part of. And secondly, we've just got a great firm and great people and it's been financially successful. And those are all important ingredients. You can have great products, but you got to be financially successful and resonate with customers as well. And so all of that has created a lot of growth and opportunity. And, you know, one of my colleagues here said to me many years ago that she stayed here because growth created unexpected opportunities for her. And I think that's true of a lot of people, me included. If I, you know, go back and ask my 21 year old self, you know, what job I'd be doing in 20 years. I would have guessed wrong. I would have guessed wrong what job I'd be doing in five years. And that's the beauty of being with something that's growing and that's trying to imagine what the future might be and doing it the right way, like, I've always loved that about us.
Kevin Bethune
Very interesting.
Dana Arnett
Kunal, many of our listeners are design junkies.
Kunal Kapoor
I would have never guessed.
Dana Arnett
And you can trace Morningstar's unique commitment back to the drawing board, I guess, of Paul Rand, who worked with Joe on the creation of your logo. And from that decisive start, there was an understanding that design played an important role and in the case of Morningstar for nearly four decades. Could you tell us a little bit about your understanding of what design was before you came to Morningstar and then how you're evolving it under your leadership?
Kunal Kapoor
I think for a lot of people, design often just refers to how something looks, right. I think at its very basic level, if you were to ask people that question, the way something looks and how they perceive that display is often exactly what people kind of equate with design. And that is an important part of it. I think of design as an enabler because it has the power to unlock things that heretofore were very, very difficult. And in the Morningstar context, if you compare us to other financial services firms, simple thing I would say is like, look at our website and compare it to some other financial services websites. And a lot of websites, it's just very dense information. You can get lost very quickly and if you're not a so-called expert, finding your way through is near impossible. For us design becomes the enabler. It's a way you tell a story. It's a way you move someone through something. It's a way you take someone who maybe is a novice and empower them to take the steps to feeling like they can engage with an expert over time. It's also the way that we can have a common language so that there's not this Wall Street versus Main Street divide, which I've always thought is bogus anyway. But imagine if everyone's speaks the same language. And for me, one of our biggest things when it comes to empowering investors is to ensure that whether you're a small investor or a large institutional investor, you speak the same language. There really shouldn't be differences in that context. At the end of the day, even the large institution exists, probably because it's in service of the retirement assets or some such thing of the individual. And so there's no reason to not use design to be able to tell the story, to be able to find familiarity, to be able to construct familiar touchpoints and to be able to demystify. Because design is very empowering tool. It's sort of the missing link between people feeling like they can get it and it's too far out of reach. And we use it so that people feel like they can get it and it becomes part of the story, part of the narrative, and ultimately the enabling function in my mind.
Kevin Bethune
That's so great.
Dana Arnett
You probably didn't even realize that user centered design, which wasn't even probably a term back then, was maybe what attracted you when you had that first website experience.
Kunal Kapoor
Yeah, no, it's true. And I think it's that interaction of design with the other elements that's so important because I think in life so many concepts are boiled down these days for consumption in a simple way. And so people don't necessarily take the time to learn what's behind them, but they should, obviously. But what we've tried to do through our design is try to convey what's behind that single anecdote or the single number. And so you can really convey a lot. And I've really come to appreciate its power. And obviously, as you said in those early days, I probably didn't realize it. But when I got to Morningstar, I very quickly realized who the powerful people are around our hallways were.
Kevin Bethune
I want to circle back quickly on your path through Morningstar. And I've heard you say in past conversations that you've often had to take on unsexy, hard weren't as attractive, or as perhaps the shiny, most visible opportunity at the moment. And one example was the Morningstar's investment services business, which you were definitely the author of. And I think through those experiences, can you describe the what or the purpose of what that business entailed and what key convictions arose for you during the journey of its creation?
Kunal Kapoor
Yeah. Yeah, that was probably my first significant management job at Morningstar, I think it was back in 2007. So it's been a while. But if you recall, a few things happened in 2007, 2008 specifically you had a global financial crisis. And so if you happen to have just been dropped into a business that relied on the markets for its revenue and its growth, you had a very, very bad outcome in a very short amount of time. But I look back on that experience as amazing because one, you sort of do feel like you're in the foxhole because everything's going wrong and you then very quickly realize that that is the kind of opportunity though, where people allow you to do all kinds of things and to take all kinds of risks. And, you know, we transformed a lot of what we were doing in those days so that when the market did start to come back two or three years later, we had a much better service, a much more stable experience, and clients who wanted to engage with us. And, you know, I learned through that experience that you don't always have to have the shiny toy to learn the most, because to this day, if you ask me professionally where I've learned the most, I'll point to experiences like that as opposed to when I've been handed shiny toys with the underlying expectation to not screw it up. That might be great because you're suddenly running the shineiest toy in the company. But if the expectation is you can't screw it up, it's sort of implicit that you shouldn't be changing a lot. And those are not the most fun jobs, it turns out. So, you know, sometimes it's really good to have the jobs that on the surface seem like the ones that, you know, could be the riskiest because the learning curve on them is easily the steepest.
Kevin Bethune
I really applaud the commitment to design from the sounds like the very beginning and all the way to your present, you know, leadership. I guess, in your mind when you focus on the design function or the design team itself, like what has made them so successful within the space of financial services? Like what-what convictions or key enablers would you say where necessary to ensure their-their success?
Kunal Kapoor
Yeah, well, I mean, I think designers, by their very nature in their titles are very creative people. And oftentimes if you're working in financial services, you run into a lot of product managers who maybe are not as creative. They have very clear roadmaps of what they want to get done, but they cannot imagine the future. They can't imagine new things. They have roadmaps that are very much geared towards delivering what's kind of needed. And a big part of what I think makes design successful and empowers people is to imagine what the experience can be like. So it's a fine balance. And I think one of the wonderful things about design and good design is knowing when you tilt very heavily in the way that your customers are saying they want to see things and also know when to tilt a little bit away from them and give them new experiences. Because you know that while you may surprise them at first, over time, they will come to appreciate what you're doing. I mean, we're all creatures of habit. And so part of the role of design is to help maybe evolve how we think about those habits.
Dana Arnett
And you've actually made designers a part of your product teams, you've made them part of your corporate culture. Were there moments of adversity for them, or have your colleagues who have worked on those teams with designers, have they learned from the insights that designers share or bring to the table?
Kunal Kapoor
Yeah. I mean, absolutely there are always moments of adversity, and I think some of the biggest moments of adversity come in, the moments of most pressure when you're trying to get product out the door and you're trying to quibble over is something exactly right or not? And, you know, someone who has revenue responsibility may care at any moment in time to get something out right away versus someone like a designer who's thinking about, is this the right thing for the next 2 to 3 years and the next two or three iterations of this product? And so there is some healthy tension that exists there. And I think particularly in growing organizations, trying to find that balance is important. And one of the things that we try to do is we try to tell our design story, give our designers independence here at Morningstar, very strong design leader in David Williams. And we also just try to make sure that when you walk in our doors that that design ethos also lives in the way our offices are designed. So David not only oversees designer of our products, but he designs the look and feel of every Morningstar office. And so there's connectivity across all those things. And, you know, you referenced that you were in our offices here in Chicago last year. A lot of people who come into the office will sort of say: Oh, it's such a nice new looking office. And they're surprised when I say: No, it's kind of more than a decade old at this point. And it just sort of speaks to the thoughtfulness with which we've tried to make sure that design is even integrated into the office space itself and then how it sort of flows through to our products. So to kind of come back to your question, there's always healthy tension. There should be just because you're a researcher or a designer or a technologist doesn't mean you should be unchallenged. There are going to be different views and there should be. But we do try to give our designers some space to make the decisions that that they need to be successful.
Dana Arnett
The Design of Business | The Business of Design is brought to you by Morningstar. Investment research, data, and strategies to empower long term investor success.
Don Phillips
I'm Don Phillips and I was the first research analyst hired at Morningstar and currently serve as a managing director.
Kevin Bethune
For over 30 years Don has continued to watch Morningstar's commitment to design grow.
Don Phillips
It's 1986 that I joined. From the very beginning we talked about having three core competencies, and it was research, design, and technology, and we always saw those as equals, not as one is subservient to the other. So immediately it became very important if you were doing research to have a close working relationship with the people that understood the technology and could develop new applications, and it became very important to work with the design team in order to communicate the ideas that we had. So from the very beginning, I was working with designers and working with-with technology people. We would say often that the classic mistake that Wall Street makes is they just throw a bunch of numbers at people and pretend that they've educated them and what were they really done is intimidated them. And one of the things that we would say is that if you have a table of numbers, it's only going to communicate to those people that already get it, that already know what to do. But if you can take those numbers and turn it into a paragraph, then you begin to widen the circle of people that can make good decisions. But if you can take it to the next level and turn it into a picture, then you can really help a whole lot of people make good decisions. And that's where design, I think, became very important to us from the very beginning to communicate in any way we could. Design is not ancillary here. With our mission being to empower investor success and recognizing that a key role we had to do was to help people modify their behavior, we needed every tool at our disposal to do that, and design was mission critical to that.
Dana Arnett
Morningstar Design. Deeper insights at the intersection of design and investing. Find out more at Morningstar.com slash careers.
Kevin Bethune
When we look into your background and the different chapters that you've navigated at Morningstar, the different roles that you've had, I often encountered the word innovation mentioned, and I guess for you and your experiences as you reflect, how would you define innovation for yourself or for Morningstar or for your team? And what does that mean in the context of an investment research and an investment management firm?
Kunal Kapoor
Yeah. So one thing I've come to realize is, especially after the past decade or so, when you talk about innovation, people automatically assume you're inventing technology and that if you're not inventing technology, there's no innovation. And I kind of reject that hypothesis because I think Morningstar and much of the innovation we've done is built on taking other innovations and deploying them in a way that allows us to be innovative. And so we use lots of technology and a lot of it is very innovative. And that leads to our innovations in terms of how we take our data software and research and get it in the hands of folks. So something as simple as even me discovering the website early in its existence, that is a use of an innovation and a very innovative way to reach customers. And so I've often thought about it that way. And today, even when we think about the cloud and how we are starting to use the cloud to deliver our products and build experiences for clients, that is the use of a technology that allows for all kinds of innovations and things you couldn't do previously. I also think about innovation through the lens of coming up with unique financial IP, if you will, intellectual property. So Morningstar may be best known for the star rating, for instance, but we have done so much more and more recently on the sustainability front coming up with just iconography that I think is really innovative and in many people's minds that —is that innovation? And of course it is something that hasn't existed. It's something that's trying to define a user experience like never before. And so those kinds of things really are important and innovative. And so I love the fact that we're great users of design and technology in essentially unlocking our ability to innovate.
Dana Arnett
Can you touch on one of the projects that might have taken into consideration both the design system but also the role of one of your design team members or the design function?
Kunal Kapoor
00:19:44] So if you look at some of the newer offerings we've had, like we launched Morningstar Investor, when-when the team is formed right at the outset, it includes a design lead. So we don't tend to form teams that are building product without a design leader involved right in there and being part of the process. And some of our teams will even kind of include, you know, designers and sort of the pre-planning process where they're starting to do market research and think about the things that, you know, we may be doing with a certain product. But the idea always is to have the designer be a core part of the team and be a core part of the building as opposed to what has happened occasionally, which we really try to guard against, where the designer is essentially taking something downstream from a product manager. That's a lot less satisfying because by then the product manager sort of conceived of what they want to do and the designers and just trying to bring that vision to life. And that tends to, I think, be a less than ideal outcome in those types of situations. So I think if they can work in lockstep, it's really important. And the best product managers understand that designers can unlock a whole lot of potential for them. We've just launched a direct indexing service here in the US and if you look at it, the workflows, they're just really beautiful. And I say that about an asset management product, and it's because the leader in that group recognized very quickly that an advantage we could have over all the other offerings is that just make it easy to use, make it beautiful to use, make someone want to be part of that experience as opposed to having to click through eight pages and try to figure out where you're toggeling and whatnot. It just it shouldn't be cumbersome, it should be fun.
Dana Arnett
So both the process and the end product then are- designer has a key and active role along the entire journey.
Kunal Kapoor
Yes. And a designer is accountable for its success too.
Dana Arnett
Yeah.
Kunal Kapoor
You don't get to sign off at the point of delivery. If the customer's got to like it and you got to be part of that process too. I think adoption in that context is really important when it comes to any kind of design work. It's great to feel like you've achieved something and put something out, but I think you've got to help and think about how to ensure that there's adoption too. I think good design really drives adoption.
Kevin Bethune
You know, human beings are idiosyncratic creatures and there might be an appetite to save for retirement, see upside from investments. But a lot of people don't make management of their portfolio, let's say a routine practice as much as maybe we'd like to see. And can you share a few anecdotes of how you've been able to make it fun, how you've been able to inspire people to start habits earlier than whathas happened before?
Kunal Kapoor
One thing I say to everyone who walks in our doors and we hire a lot of people who don't necessarily have finance backgrounds, we like to hire smart people, and we always say we can teach them the finance part. But I often say to those folks, like one easy thing is spend 10 minutes a day on Morningstar.com reading an article, just one article. And maybe the first one doesn't make sense to you, but it leads to one question and you get an answer. And the second one still doesn't make sense. But you understood a little bit more and so on and so forth until you open an article and then it does make sense to you. So I think those kinds of things, you know, are important and fun can also start to occur when you actually understand it and then enter a portfolio and you get to start with the retirement portfolio. It doesn't have to be complicated, putt in the few things you own in retirement, check them once a week. You don't need to check them every day. Check them once a week, come back, see what's changing, and you just find ways to engage and then think about what if I did this or what if I did that? What if I tilted my portfolio that way? Even just spending an hour a week on it, more than enough, in my view.
Kevin Bethune
And are there conversations brewing that connect design with perhaps behavior psychology within those conversations?
Kunal Kapoor
There are. I mean, we're all kind of captive to our behavior in that sense. And we all sort of tend to follow the herd, so to speak. And then we're working pretty hard to think about how to help people be more successful investors by using slight design nudges to allow them to sort of avoid the common mistakes that investors often tend to fall prey to.
Kevin Bethune
Indeed. If we push further on this theme of accessibility, how do you think about this as it relates to underbanked or perhaps marginalized communities where the acumen, the habits aren't yet established and there's perhaps an opportunity to make it a more important priority for them?
Kunal Kapoor
I mean, I think the Morningstar mission goes to the heart of that, which is that we want to empower people. You know, I said earlier that there's this sort of Wall Street versus Main Street divide, and I think it's largely artificial. It doesn't have to be that way. No matter where you are, one of the reasons a lot of individuals don't engage is because they think it's out of their reach, that it's not for them, that they don't have enough and really don't need much to start, especially these days, the cost of entry is de minimis. And, you know, I can even think back to when I started at Morningstar. I used to put away $100 a month in a mutual fund, and I sort of— that that's how I started my investing journey. It was not a big number, but I start with $100 outside of my 41k, but in a taxable account, but one mutual fund started 100 bucks a month. Then when I got a raise, went up a little bit from there. And so I think just thinking of these kinds of triggers, like there's no magic number, but the important thing is to do it, do it early, and commit yourself to sticking with it. And I think Morningstar in that sense, has really tried to, you know, construct a platform that regardless of where you fall in the experience level and the wealth level on the interest level, that there is a way for you to slowly over time be quite successful and you too, can be the so-called millionaire next door. I think in that way, no matter where you are today.
Dana Arnett
You know, in reflecting on those early $100 investment days. All the way up—
Kunal Kapoor
I still own those funds.
Dana Arnett
Good for you. And as you reflect on those experiences, all the experience has actually been touching on at Morningstar. You know, you can't help but ask a CEO to talk a little bit about this idea of legacy, you know, both inheriting a brand with a lot of strong design legacy and being a pioneering brand in the space and then pushing that legacy forward. How do you balance the responsibility of, you know, the past and maintaining some of those best practices and ideals while continuing to push forward in a space that's very innovative and that and it demands change?
Kunal Kapoor
Yeah, that's a great question, because in any organization you very quickly have groupings of people who believe that it should always be the way that it's always been, and groupings of people who believe like an absolutely has to change for you to survive in the future. And I sort of believe you always have to take the best of the legacy that you've built and the valuable attributes that you've received out of it. And then evolved where it makes sense. And that's what we've tried to do at Morningstar. We still have a very master brand oriented strategy. We've bought some businesses and, you know, we have some work to do to kind of think about how to integrate them. But you'll see in the next couple of years that we're going to try to simplify how we think about our, you know, branding, especially as we become much larger. But, you know, I'm not afraid to challenge the status quo, but I just think we have a really good starting point. And so I respect that a lot. And I want to make sure that we protect that legacy and heritage, but that we appropriately build upon it.
Kevin Bethune
And building upon it, I guess. It sort of leads to maybe my last question around this notion of a converging future. Your next generation investor and even the financial planning manager has much different value criteria perhaps than previous generations. And I guess, how do you think about Morningstar's positioning is served while wrestling with all these new forces over the horizon, the shifting value criteria— security concerns across health, basic needs, finance?
Kunal Kapoor
Yeah. I mean, I don't want to be flip about it, but I've seen this movie before in some ways, because every generation will bring some level of these types of issues to the table. And of course, some of them are different. But for us, having a clear mission and using the mission as kind of the way that, you know, we're guided, I think ultimately helps us be relevant. It is no less relevant today to say that we're trying to demystify investing and empower individuals than it was when I walked in here 25 years ago. In fact, the world is even more complicated today. And so our ability to do that and to do it through great design, through the use of technology and to put amazing research on top of it, I think is as relevant as ever. And so I'm optimistic in that sense. And, you know, I feel like even days when you sort of have kind of down days in the market and you've had a really tough 2022, those are good years for people to actually think about. Hey, maybe I should be taking a look at this. That's you know, Warren Buffett always says be greedy when others are fearful. And I think there's a lot to be said for that because this is a great time to actually start building a base if you haven't already. And we want to help people do that. So I love the challenge of it. And in some ways, you do see the movie over and over again, but you respond to it differently. And that's what we're trying to do. But we want to make sure we keep demystifying an ever evolving investment landscape for investors.
Dana Arnett
Kunal, thank you so much for sharing insights and we very much appreciate your time today.
Kunal Kapoor
I very much appreciate being here. Thank you both.
Kevin Bethune
Thank you.
Kevin Bethune
The Design of Business | The Business of Design is a podcast from Design Observer. Our website is DBBD dot Design Observer dot com. There you can find more about our guest today, Kunal Kapoor, plus the complete archive from past guests and hosts To listen, go to DBBD dot Design Observer dot com.
Dana Arnett
If you like what you heard today, please subscribe to the podcast. You can find The Design of Business | The Business of Design in Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Kevin Bethune
And if you're already a subscriber to the podcast, tell your friends about the show or go to Apple Podcasts and rate us, which is a great way to let other people know about the show.
Dana Arnett
Thank you again to our partner Morningstar for making this conversation possible. Experience the intersection of design and investing at Morningstar.com. And between episodes you can keep up with Design Observer on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Kevin Bethune
Our producer is Adina Karp. Judybelle Camangyan edits the show. Betsy Vardell is Design Observer's executive producer. Our theme music is by Mike Errico. Special thanks to George Cassidy at the Morningstar recording studio. And thanks, as always, to Design Observer founder Jessica Helfand and other previous hosts Ellen McGirt and Michael Bierut.
Dana Arnett
See you next time.
Kevin Bethune
Talk to you then.
