Design for Financial Inclusion

We’re a small team at Life Moments, typical of a startup. While this means we all feel the weight of the company’s success on our shoulders, it also means we live and breathe multi-faceted roles.

This, in turn, presents some interesting opportunities, one of which began in late 2024 when we teamed up with some other organisations with the aim to improve customer experience for investors across the UK.

We speak to each other every day about Consumer Duty, how our products aid financial services firms to improve and evidence that they’re supporting customers, and ensuring that those customers understand enough about the product they’ve been sold to make good decisions around them.

Alongside consumer duty, we also heavily focus on financial inclusion. Accessibility, in its widest sense, is a serious matter. And so getting involved in projects that aim to impact this area of our industry is mission critical for us.

Following our own advice on inclusion, I want to explain about this project using language that enables anyone to understand what’s going on in the depths of the finance world.

The problem to solve

It all started with The Savings and Investment Alliance (TISA). They’re a trade body who regularly collaborate with firms like ours to research the state of financial inclusion.

The goal for this project was outlined as follows:

To explore and undertake research into what information is decision-useful for consumers, how to layer and present accordingly, plus link to life stages.

Let’s unpack that statement.

Their hypothesis was that retail investors – that’s normal folk, like you & I, who use an investment platform to buy stocks & funds – typically don’t understand why the funds they’ve bought into are moving up & down, therefore they’re not able to make good decisions regarding those investments.

Further to this, that investors just don’t engage with the fund performance reports that platforms send to their customers. Those that do engage, don’t find them understandable. And that by personalising these reports, investors would engage more, understand more, therefore make better financial decisions.

While this sounds like a problem that can be tackled by each individual investment platform by redesigning those reports, it’s not quite that simple.

The problem lies in regulation. The FCA have limited the kind of content that can be included in these reports, and so product teams across the UK have too few opportunities for improvement.

What initiates financial regulation change?

Innovation in technology may make it obvious that a new issue is around the corner, the rise of AI tools for the masses for example.

Occasionally a statewide financial crisis may occur that forces new regulation to protect consumers. Something like Brexit comes to mind in this case.

The recent change to a Labour Government is also likely to drive new regulations that align with their specific policies.

But none of this is likely to reach the notion of inclusive investing.

For the FCA to upgrade regulations here, it takes thorough research and analysis of the current situation. And that’s exactly the kind of project we’re proud to have been involved in.

Alongside TISA, we were joined by representatives from Vanguard investment platform and research agency EY Seren.

Stage 1 - Qualitative testing

Sophie LeGrand-Green, Policy Executive at TISA, was leading the project. She set out a three stage plan starting with a set of interviews.

We needed some clickable prototypes to show test participants. Prashanthi Balanchander, Product Designer in my team at Life Moments, led the design efforts for this.

The working group discussed feature ideas to personalise the reports. Mockups and prototypes were created to show to test participants:

• Interactive tooltips that explain financial jargon
• Dataviz options to extend basic tables & charts
• A quiz to determine investing experience before showing either a basic or advanced report
• A choice of benchmarks to overlay on one particular chart
• A list of questions that other investors asked, answered by the professionals
• Educational content presented in various formats
• An AI-powered assistant to answer any questions investors may have

Shortly before Xmas 2024 my team at Life Moments joined Simon Redmill, User Researcher at Vanguard to conduct 22 interviews with participants from the Vanguard testing panel.

I learned so much from speaking to these people. Aside from advancing our project I found it to be enormously inspiring to look more deeply at my own investments.

Most participants that I spoke to weren’t investing for any particular goal other than building up wealth for retirement years. It brought one question to the fore – where I should focus on investing my own money:

• Stocks & shares?
• Pension?
• An ISA?
• Cryptocurrency?
• Crowdfunding startups?

This single study has led me to examine my own finances in a way I previously hadn’t considered. I’m using AI to understand the difference in approaches, and discovering more online tools to calculate my own situation.

At Life Moments we’re currently focussed on building new AI tools so the learning around the AI assistant we’re most potent for our product team.

The main problem with consumer use of AI is trust in it’s responses.

There seemed to be a different levels of awareness that led people to their current opinion on whether they’d use it for personal finance or not.

• To the inexperienced it was unclear how modern AI technology is more capable than a basic chatbot that they may have experienced while troubleshooting their internet connection, for example.
• Those who have used AI before were concerned with the potential bias in its responses, that traditional methods of investment research would remain a better option
• More familiar AI users were worried about how the personal data they type into the assistant might be used to train a model.

Across the 22 participants I noticed that those who hadn’t made use of AI technology held the most distrustful perception, and those more experienced trusted it the most.

This study has been invaluable in understanding how we can tackle these trust issues in our own products. Our own AI system is now taking these learnings into account and providing our clients with design advice and configuration options that directly address them.

The results of the qualitative test gave us great confidence that our hypotheses were strong (yet broad), and helped inform the next stage of the process – designing the quant survey.

Stage 2 - Quantitative testing

Here’s where our collaborators at EY Seren have the most experience. Their background in deep user research lent enormous gravitas to this project.

Seren’s Principal Experience Design Researcher Desmond Kiernan guided us through numerous video calls to discuss how the quantitative research could be done.

The goal was to design a survey, to be sent to 500 respondents, that asked similar questions to those posed in the qualitative interviews. Sharlene Hsia, Senior Consultant at EY Seren did the heavy lifting work here, diligently building the survey and taking onboard feedback from the team with each session.

By understanding patterns in these people’s perception of Fund Performance Report designs, the findings could be considered significant enough to write an official white paper about what was learned, and therefore influence the FCA towards changing regulations.

We had our mockups and prototypes already built, but when asking people to fill out a survey, with no monetary incentive, the survey needed to take no longer than 10 minutes to complete.

So, to explain these concepts comprehensively and quickly, I turned Bala’s prototypes into short videos showing the prototypes in action with a voiceover explaining the key features. And, of course, captions were added to make these videos inclusive to all.

The results of the survey took a couple of weeks to complete – and were nothing short of excellent.

Not only did we discover that the hypotheses were proven, that we can indeed improve perception of these Fund Performance Reports through an inclusive design approach, but the strength of these findings was incredible.

Stage 3 - The report

I learnt a great framework for thinking about data from my colleague Sarah Mitchell - Product Manager and Sustainability Lead at Life Moments:

• What? – What does the data show? Literally just the facts held within the data.
• So what? – Some of these facts are significant, meaningful, and impactful. What is it that makes some facts particularly interesting? These are the insights.
• Now what? – With great knowledge comes great responsibility, so what can you now do to use these insights and improve customer’s lives?

Jonny Revell, Lead Research and Insight Consultant at EY Seren aided Sophie to pool everyone’s thoughts on what the survey results showed. The what, and the so what.

Sophie’s report – Rethinking Performance Disclosures – is currently available to TISA members, with an executive summary also available to anyone that’s interested. It’s worth a read.

Yesterday our CEO, Ben Leonard, was part of the presentation at the TISA Inclusive Investing Conference, where the research was officially launched.

Now what?

With a published report, and some national press behind it, this research project now has some momentum to make real change to people’s financial outcomes.

It’s been a pleasure collaborating with such a great bunch of intelligent and hard-working individuals. And I’m proud to have added my parts to the process. I’ve learnt a lot along the way.

I’ve leave you here with some further thoughts on the power of collaboration, explained all so well by the great Rory Sutherland:

We get so fixated on proving what we can achieve alone, that we neglect the impact of what we could achieve together.