NEW YORK, NY / ACCESS Newswire / September 15, 2026 / Creativity is often treated as a talent some people simply have and others don't, a spark that shows up in a mood board or a marketing pitch but has no place in a spreadsheet. Kotaro Shimogori, a financial technology executive with a design background, argues that this framing gets creativity backward. For Shimogori, creativity isn't a personality trait reserved for visual work; it's a discipline, one that can be practiced, structured, and applied deliberately to the hardest problems in finance.
Creativity as Practice, Not Personality
Shimogori doesn't buy the idea that quantitative work and creative work sit on opposite ends of a spectrum. "To me, it's all the same instinct," he says, "just pointed at different material." But the more consequential part of his view isn't where that line falls; it's that creativity, wherever it shows up, behaves like a discipline rather than a flash of inspiration. "It has methods. It can be trained," he explains. And like any discipline, it gets stronger with repetition and weaker with neglect.
That distinction matters in an industry built around risk models, compliance checklists, and audited processes. Financial technology doesn't reward improvisation, and Shimogori doesn't argue that it should. Instead, he treats creative thinking the way a firm might treat any other core competency. "It's something you build into how people evaluate problems," he says. "You don't just hope it shows up when a team gets stuck."
Building Creativity Into How Decisions Get Made
Shimogori's approach shows up less in brainstorming sessions and more in how problems get framed in the first place. Treating creativity as a discipline means asking different questions before a decision is made, not "what's the safest option" by default, but "what are we assuming that might not be true," and testing that assumption with the same rigor a risk team would apply to a model. It means building in the habit of looking at a problem from outside its own category, a practice that comes naturally to people who move between visual and analytical work but doesn't have to be limited to them.
This is also where Shimogori sees the biggest organizational opportunity: most finance teams already have people capable of this kind of thinking, but few firms build the space for it into their actual workflows. Creative discipline, in his view, isn't about hiring differently, it's about giving the people already in the room permission and process to challenge a default answer before it hardens into policy.
Constraints as the Engine, Not the Obstacle
A common assumption is that creativity needs open space to flourish and that rules and regulation choke it off. Shimogori's experience in financial technology points the other way. Regulatory requirements, legacy infrastructure, and compliance obligations aren't creativity's enemy; they're often what forces it to show up at all. An unconstrained brief tends to produce familiar answers; a tightly bound one forces a team to find the option nobody had considered because the easy options are already off the table.
Approaching constraint this way changes what "creative" even means inside a business context. It's not about generating more ideas, it's about generating the right idea inside a fixed set of limits, then having the discipline to test it, refine it, and defend it the same way any other business case would need to be defended.
A Discipline, Not a Department
inside an organization: everywhere, not in a single design or innovation team walled off from the rest of the business. "If it's a discipline and not a department, it belongs everywhere," he says, "in the roadmap, the go-to-market plan, the technology bets a leadership team decides are worth making."
For an industry that often treats "creative" as a synonym for "cosmetic," that's a meaningful reframe. Shimogori's argument isn't that finance needs more artists. "It's the same discipline an artist applies to their craft," he explains, "practice, iteration, testing an idea against real constraints. That's what makes for a better business decision, whether the output is an interface or a risk framework." Treated that way, creativity stops being a soft skill on the margins of the business and becomes one of its more durable competitive advantages.
CONTACT:
Andrew Mitchell
media@cambridgeglobal.com
SOURCE: Cambridge Global
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