3 ways to rethink financial product design without leaving users out

Here’s a statement no benefits professional wants to hear:  ”Our employees aren’t using our financial wellness program.”

Next step? The employer tries other ways of ”getting” employees to use the program — better messaging! Cool incentives! Consultants!  But there’s no “if you build it, they will come” happy ending and the company stops offering the benefit, assuming employees don’t want it.

But is that the right assumption? “If users aren’t using something, you don’t fix or blame the users — you try to better understand why they aren’t using it,” said Haydee Moreno, COO of JUST, in a panel discussion on inclusive design of financial products.

Maybe that job is for employers – but maybe it’s even more imperative for the people who designed the product in the first place.

With insights from fellow panelists Rendel Solomon, founder of Solomon Financial Institute, and Pam Mayer, SVP at PNC, Moreno summed up what might be Best Practice #1 in financial product design: “Think beyond the product and consider the human experience.”

The panelists’ discussion with Commonwealth moderator Melissa Gopnik at times unwittingly served to illustrate Commonwealth’s own principles for inclusive design:

1. Design for systemic change. People need financial services that meet their needs and aspirations, providing actionable knowledge at the right time.

Rendel Solomon of Solomon Financial told about being asked to speak at an event where children would learn about money and investments and actually be given a sum of money to use. Three children showed up for the talk and the free money. Why? Possibly because the event was scheduled on a Saturday. Some of the adults might be working second jobs, or had no one to watch their other children, or didn’t have easy access to transportation, especially public transportation, on a Saturday.

“I tell this story,” Solomon said, “because I had to think about systemic design vs. individual behavior, and I had to think more deeply about how to help kids access this world.” A simple yet effective change he suggested was to offer the program at a place where kids were already gathered, to avoid the additional barriers of parents having to take off work, find babysitters and deal with transportation issues.

“In the financial services industry, it feels like we keep creating detours that say look at this wonderful product, you have access,” he said, but the system issues aren’t addressed, “and the detours still lead to the same pothole-filled road.”

2. Foster agency. People who previously have not had control over their financial options need to feel in control.

Show people actions they can take, offer them specific, jargon-less information about how to reach an aspiration, including step-by-step guidance, said Pam Mayer with PNC. Be wary of telling people what to do without fully knowing their situation, she said.

For example, some financial education programs and apps aim to teach low-income people how to create a budget. But that assumes people are in that situation because they don’t know how to budget — in fact, the panel agreed, people with low incomes are often experts at budgeting, squeezing the most out of the little money they do have just to successfully survive.

3. Focus on aspirations. Most financial products aimed at people on a low income typically deal with a negative subject, debt, rather than focusing on an aspirational subject such as saving for a car, a home, etc.

Trabian Shorters has written that the language typically used to describe people (especially Black people) in difficult life situations focuses on the negative, using a “deficit” word or phrase to describe them: “at-risk youth,” and “low-income households.” (Would YOU want to be described that way? he asks.)

The flip side of deficit is asset — using a phrase that’s just as true, that instead focuses on a person’s or group’s aspirations:  “a student striving to overcome a threatening environment and graduate,” and “an employee who is trying to save for retirement while on a low income.”

Of course,  articulating the need for inclusive design and suggesting how best to approach it doesn’t get the job done. Can companies make a profit designing inclusive products for what might be less-than affluent customers?

The question can imply “we will only do right by you if it makes us money,” Rendel said. “Then the question becomes, how much profit do they need?” When considering costs, ”include cost to environment, community, and people.”

Such “stakeholder capitalism” is already a concept business and industry are increasingly aware of, and ties in with the growing emphasis on ESG factors (environmental, social, governance), Mayer added.

And don’t assume there aren’t any side benefits in designing for a vulnerable group, Moreno said.  Working with a segment of “extreme users,” who are experiencing a common pain point more severely than others, “can help to unearth attitudes and motivations and anxieties that don’t bubble up for the rest of us. And that can be packaged or applied to a lot of scenarios.”