EXCLUSIVE— Innovation is a tricky business. You want your bank to onboard customers on mobile devices, for example (good idea!) but what is the best way to do that? An imperfect implementation could lead to major problems.

There are many ways to go about exploring this — you can read the research, you can compare notes with existing solutions, and these days, you can even see what other solutions feel like to the customer.

It might not seem so easy to find out how a bank in Turkey onboards customers (and who knows what their KYC is like) or how a P2P service in India looks and feels. But a new service called Pulse from the UK consultancy 11:FS offers a firsthand look. Pulse is a video-driven service, with actual customers driving products in time-stamped videos, so viewers can move to specific parts of the process, if they so choose.

With Pulse, a user can search for “mobile onboarding,” and be presented with a number of videos from various banks and other services from around the globe, and its directory is growing on the time.

“We have a panel of real customers, real account holders around the world,” said Ross Methven, 11:FS co-founder. “We have documented 600 customer journeys, with more added every week. If you want to see how WeChat onboards customers in China — whatever you want to see — we have that.”

11:FS ranks the solutions on a five-point scale within each product category, and down the road a Hall of Fame or Best of Category classification may be introduced as well. Its most popular searches are for onboarding, followed by APIs/open banking, payments, biometrics & security, and bots, Methven said. The service is available as a subscription priced by number of users.

The reaction from banks has been enthusiastic, said Sam Maule, managing partner for North America. “We’ve had people say to us, ‘We need this thing inside our bank to understand our own products,'” Maule said.

Pulse was created to replace the “100-page research reports, PDFs with screenshots,” Methven said. The companies that produce those reports have also launched their own digital directories, Panorama Fintech from McKinsey, and DeNovo from PwC. They also offer insight into the solutions Pulse documents, but in quite different ways.

These services are more comprehensive than Pulse, with written analysis and industry data housed in large directories. They are essentially dynamic digital reports, with frequent data inputs and fresh coverage, while Pulse is focused on documenting the customer journey. DeNovo, for example, can serve as something of a dashboard to a chief innovation officer (it is customizable to focus on different areas of interest of different executives) and offers data ranging from startup funding to data on commercial real estate loans to an overview of new regulations that impact banking.

DeNovo will soon be “completely free,” according to PwC, and is already free for limited functionality. Panorama Fintech, which has more of a startup focus, is a subscription service.

Catalogues of fintech solutions, particularly APIs, are woefully lacking, which is one of the needs these products are working toward filling. Pulse was released in early 2017. DeNovo launched the year prior. Panorama Fintech is part of a suite of products that has existed at least since 2014.

Pulse may not replace services such as DeNovo or Panorama Fintech, but uniquely, it does offer a firsthand view into what the customer experience might look like if you implement that sexy new solution.