Fincoach
Fincoach is a personal money management system which will help users advance financial knowledge. It will help people increase confidence and manage money smartly. It focuses on ongoing behavioural change, executive attention, goal setting and progress monitoring.
Scope
Service design
Design strategy
User experience
Client
Lloyds Bank
(Financial service)
Year
2019, Jan.-Apr.
My Role
User research
Prototype design
Workshop Facilitation
Experience design
ABOUT
The Fincoach: a new kind of bank employee. A Fincoach helps you improve your financial knowledge and get financially fit. He/She will help you get up to speed on what 'money' is and how to start managing it smarter. Your coach will also help you set financial goals for yourself and create a custom journey for you to achieve them. This service is targeted at college students and young working professionals.
CHALLENGE
With 'Fintech' startups disrupting banking services and open banking slowly turning the financial ecosystem into a competitive marketplace Lloyds Banking Group wanted to rethink what a bank branch should be and do in 2020.
OUTCOME
DESK RESEARCH
Bank branch died out
In the Fiserv survey, consumers reported visiting branches to deposit checks and withdraw cash. I believe that in the future, neither of those reasons for visiting a branch will hold true. Rather, branches will serve an entirely different function. Branches are the ideal place for these complex conversations to take place, so banks and credit unions should rethink their branches first with a customer-centric focus. What kind of space will feel inviting to customers, signal they’re welcome to take their time and ask questions and give them a feeling of security without intimidation?
INSIGHTS
Mutual Trust
When people are making big financial decisions, they prefer to get assistances via face-to-face interaction. And the help should be objective and professional. Customers also need to accumulate good credit score to gain the trust from the bank.
Financial Literacy
People typically won’t receive any financial education during their studies and will be unprepared when they face financial challenges.
Mental Health
Banking services are not designed to accommodate people's personal lives. Studies indicate that financial worries are a common cause of mental health problems, and vice versa.
Branch is a Social Environment
The branch is evolving into a transactional environment. Since most banking can be done on a phone branches need to capitalize on how they empower their employees in a branch. The branch needs to be a place where customers can interact with experts and solve problems together.
"How might we empower the bank branch to improve people’s money management and reduce financial worries?"
IDEATION - CO-CREATED WORKSHOP
Participants X7 / Research activities X4 / Focus group interview
Personas
Understand our target audiences and see what their goals and challenges are.
Contextual Inquiry
Identify where the problems come from when it comes to managing money.
Prioritize urgent problems
Analyze the problems, then see which areas they would like to improve upon and whether they need experts to support.
Brainstorming
Co-created the possible ideas with our users and identify the solutions which are more viable and feasible.
PROTOTYPING SESSION
Understood what kind of environment do users like to have financial consultation
Investigated who has the best fit for the role of financial coach
Identified the motivation behind getting into Fincoach service
LEARNING FROM PROTOTYPING
Judgement free consultant
The consultant experience needs to be practical and unbiased to suggest tangible solutions of how people manage their money better even just a small change. And people don't like being told how to live their life so that receiving judgement may be seemed offensive to them.
Track learning outcome
Based on our study, people are interested in seeing their progress from fincoach. This helps them to understand if they make the progress of their money management skills. Also, they would like to see the feedback beyond the numbers and increase a good sense of money decision.
Build relationships with financial coach
People prefer to share their personal finance status to someone who is professional and reliable so that they will be able to stick on it and build up long term relationship with them. This is important because people don't really take risk to find a new person who is not trustworthy and deal with their finance.
USE CASE
SERVICE DESIGN BLUEPRINT
DESIGN APPROACH
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Iteration: Anything that is developed from scratch will be an assumption. It’s essential to keep iterating to understand the users and their needs while they evolve. If a test fails, test again.
• Feedback loop: Align the vision with stakeholders and teammates what is the goal and impact we are trying to create, then it could help us make decisions faster and come up with solid solutions.