Findi
Client
EY Seren
Year
2023
Location
London
Topics
Behaviour Change
Service Design
Business Design
We partnered with EY Seren and explored the brief set for us: How can we shift the mindset and behaviours of people to drive better financial decisions that ensure life-long financial safety and stability?
People often make decisions against their own best interests. This is particularly evident in the way they manage their money. About 30% of British people have no more than 1000 pounds in savings, and 4 million have no savings at all
My role in the project was to enable self reflection in the team to unlock novel insights, I also designed a interview approach that helped explore participants relationships with money one step at a time in a context-sensitive way.
Discover
Our team, dived deep into behavioural factors that impend people from making good decisions about their money, saving their income or moving up the financial ladder.The process involved exploring factors that formed and impacted people's current relationship with money and their approach to managing their finances. Our team also became mindful of our own relationships with and perceptions of money in the process to surface assumptions and insights, in addition to those from our research Participants.
Define
Our target audience primarily involved Gen-z. Our key insights were:
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1. Unexpected costs are a major barrier to savings.
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2.Gen-Z, don't believe in pensions and desire higher returns. However, there is a desire to save, with many looking to their first jobs to start saving.
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3. Amongst the people who do not save money or struggle to save, we found two behaviours
3. 1 People who recognised their struggle to save
3. 2 People who recognised that they did not save very well but did not recognise the struggle
Develop
With insights from our research and prototyping we created Findi. Findi is a 1-year long employee benefit cum financial service that helps young people to start saving money at a pivotal moment in their lives, i.e. when they start working. It aims to help build healthy savings behaviours that can become the backbone of a healthy financial life. Our service helps people who start saving for emergencies through a mix of automated savings and targeted intervention of money use.
Findi creates an emergency savings account from income. Findi's default preferences redirects 20% of monthly salary into the emergency saving account and auto budgets the rest 80% for use. Emergency Savings here is the money that is supposed to be used for unexpected expenses that might be incurred in cases of emergencies. For eg. a car breaks down, a job loss etc. Since Findi focuses on creating a pool for emergencies, its architecture has been designed around the use of that money.
For behaviour change, self-reflection is a crucial. Findi enables this 4 feedback mechanisms:
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1. Notifications: signal of warning before going over budget.
2. Review and analysis page: helps users reflect on what expenses could be avoided and identify emotions that might be linked to them.
3. Behaviour change graph is a motivator/ warning signal by showing how one's spending/saving is are changing over time.
4. Level of security bar: Long term financial roadmap to encourages progress and consistency.
Deliver
We found out through light touch prototyping that if our service was to be used at all, the employer was the most trusted source to provide it. Hence, our ideal business plan is to provide this service as an employee benefits scheme to companies who will provide it for free to their new 1st time employees. In exchange for the service fee, we will provide companies with performance measurement reports, to show real impact and, where possible, insights that can help them take better care of their employees.
Feedback
Findi has received great feedback from heads of transformation of large corporate banks in UK and other experts in the sector.
In Collaboration with:
Chenxian Meng, Heng Yao, Max Stilp and Yanan Li