Executive Summary

NatWest is one of the largest retail and commercial banks in the UK, and it has been committed to creating a society which is financially confident and resilient. They hope to empower people to take control of their finances and their futures to make the most of their money.

Through a deep understanding of NatWest service providers, customers, and young families' financial relationships, we created interactive educational digital aids for NatWest to help millennial parents build a healthy family financial outlook.

Instead of replacing the financial behaviours of young parents, our intervention complements the interaction and connection of real parent-child communication scenarios. This new dynamic forms the basis for new, more meaningful ways of transforming young parents' financial habits and resilience, and helping them achieve their goals.

Solution

Financial mindsets are formed at people’s early age by generational habits.

However, 55% of UK adults don’t feel comfortable talking about money or financial worries, because they are expected to know it all and not make mistakes. —Money is a taboo topic

Meanwhile, 60% of UK parents lack financial vocabulary and support for families that borrow financial EQ, so they find it challenging to build healthy financial relationships with their children.

Insights

Research questions

Partner: NatWest, Royal College of Art

Period: FEB - MAY 2022

Focus: Service design, Design Research, Business design, UX design, Prototyping

Sector: Financial taboo, Network effects, Communities

Tool: Figma, Adobe suite, Miro

Project prototyped a sustainable financial literacy model based on conversational banking services aiming to help young families in the UK enhance financial well-being by transitioning financial mindset patterns, in partnership with NatWest.

This is done by helping millennial parents identify and break resourceful generational habits so that they may have better interpersonal communication about money with their children and beyond.

  • How might NatWest embolden their 19 million users?

  • How might families access guidance or inspirations from their network?

  • How might we address financial anxiety help families have a sustainable financial growth journey?

Vision

Create a self-sustaining community-led network effect using high financial EQ for 4 million families across the UK, such that our overall financial resilience, literacy and confidence of the next generation is higher.

Solution

So if we…

provide a space for conversations, enabled by financial Emotional Quotient vocabulary building and personalised assistance to millennial parents

Process

Mission

How might we help parents deconstruct and reconstruct their relationship with money, consciously change their generational mindsets, and create a healthy financial foundation with their children through Unlearning and Re-learning together?

The hypothesis from one key insight: Children grasp financial mindsets from families.

It can be tough to change one’s behavioural patterns and mental models…

Then we will see…

parents relaying better financial interpersonal communication to children so as to strengthen financial resilience within young families, and achieve better financial capability for financially fit next generations.

User Validation

We held 5 workshops and interviewed over 50 parents and kids. Our workshops and testing methods were designed around various creative mediums to bring out the conversations

We verified the method that learning through an enhanced mode of conversations around money for release, relief and relearning.

Value Proposition

User journey

Value

MONSET TALK as a service aims to bring together the feasibility of conversational banking combined with people's preference for prompt and private solutions. It also attempts to be cost-effective and scalable.

Looking at the overview of this service, once that is built on four pillars, it has an omnichannel that provides social support, which is experiential, immersive and self-serviced.

On the front end, we used tested concepts such as nudge theory, habit stacking, family-based learning and the perimeter of trust.

We combined that with back-end functionalities such as open banking, data aggregation, natural language processing, conversational banking and personal finance management.

In our view, each of the business strategies caters to the brief of network effects in its unique piece. In the socio-cultural context, we discovered that if more conversations or vocabulary could be built for financial EQ, there could be more awareness among communities such that the taboo is tackled. Understanding the database network effect will be quite straightforward.

With more users, machine learning can develop smarter algorithms in order to provide more accurate responses to future users. With the respect to partners, our goal would be to form a network of parents, and promotional partners, along with small and medium enterprises to collaborate with for revenue generation. In the future, as Monset gains more traction and trust, the service we expand to other user groups drivers are never mediums and advance with more intelligent features.

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