Pieter Baert's keynote on design thinking emphasizes its importance in the financial industry, highlighting it as a user-centered, hands-on approach that focuses on empathy and creativity to solve complex problems. Design thinking encourages iterative processes involving empathy, ideation, prototyping, and testing to foster innovation and improve customer experiences. While beneficial for addressing 'wicked' problems, it also requires a viable business strategy and acknowledges that not every situation calls for design thinking.