Financial Health Check

One of the UK's biggest banking groups wished to trial a new process for helping their customers become more "financially fit".

• 4.1 million people failed to pay bills or credit commitments in three or more of the last 6 months

• Only just over a third (35%) of those aged 45-54 have prepared for retirement.

• 46% of all UK adults say they have limited financial knowledge

Using physical branches to their advantage, they invited 100s of customers to arrange an interview with their local branch. Earlier research proved that customers still wanted to have face to face interaction with banking staff.

We built 2 critical apps. One to allow coleagues to easily input anonymised customer data without lengthy integration or privacy concerns. And a second app that was used during the in-branch interview itself to make sense of the data and set prioritised actions.

We had just 7 weeks (discovery followed by 2 development sprints) to get these apps ready for a pilot with branch colleagues and over 100 customers. Integrating with the exisiting bank's systems to access customer financial data would have been far too complicated and lengthy, so we needed a much leaner solution.

I created an app that allowed branch colleagues to manually enter the last 6 months of anonomysed customer data. I used a Firebase real-time database for this which kept the local state and cloud database in sync, auto-saving as data is entered.

This app was also used to manage timeboxed actions that were set during the customer inverviews. This meant they could be discussed and updated in future appointment.

Result

The pilot ran for around 6 weeks in which 124 face to face interviews took place, with virtually no bugs being reported. After interviews took place we asked each customer to complete a quick Typeform survey in order to gain some insight into their experience.

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