100 million working age adults in Europe are financially struggling. How can we help financially challenged Millennials make better financial decisions without explicitly telling them how to spend their money?
What differentiates Jarvis from other solutions is the focus of its services around major life events. It provides you with personally tailored information in a proactive manner, while remaining a trusted assistant, available to you 24 hours a day. Interacting with Jarvis will be like having a conversation with your smartest friend.
When starting the TFI Incubator, various research teams already touched on the subject of financial health and how to empower people making ends meet. As a team, we plunged into all of the data to find information that is most relevant for the project. From there on, we mapped our insights onto an Affinity Diagram.
During the discovery workshop, we created a Competitor Analysis to illustrate which players were already in the field to help our target audience make better and healthier financial decisions.
We envision a platform based business model for Jarvis, enabling various partners and users to connect, provide value and generate revenue through an interactive, diversified eco-system.Users receive advice, recommendations and tools from Jarvis, while providing it with valuable insight on their needs and preferences. Users are also introduced to additional products and services, provided by partners cross-selling through the Jarvis platform.
Partners can integrate Jarvis into their existing functionalities, using Jarvis as an engine to acquire and retain clients in a cost-effective manner, extending well into the partner’s brand recognition and customer loyalty. We see this being particularly attractive to budgeting apps (Yolt or Mint), retail platforms (Google Shopping) and advisory boards (Money Advice Service in the UK).
We conducted User Interviews to get a better understanding of those who are “financially squeezes”. We interviewed 60 participants aged between 20-40 years and discovered they had the following characteristics:
I’ve created 3 User Personas based on the initial research and interviews we had with our target audience to get a clear grasp of a user's needs before mapping out the relevant features for them.
Each persona represented a person that is:
The User Personas has helped me understand the various issues, needs and goals each individual has, along with the level of relief a product or service can offer for their stuggles.
The biggest takeaway from these perspectives are:
During the whole project Jennifer, Sasha and William (our personas) were hanging in our “War Corner” so we can continuously look at the metrics for each of them, identifying if our solutions still fit their needs and goals.
“Sometimes we put ourselves on a financial diet until the storm is over, then we just go back to our old lifestyle”
Almost 22 million UK working age adults are financially struggling or squeezed.
Meaning they have high over-indebtedness with little or no savings buffer [struggling] or are heavily reliant on credit usage and lack sufficient savings buffers to cope with unexpected life events. [squeezed]
HELPING WITH SMART PURCHASE OF DAILY ITEMS WILL CREATE AWARENESS OF THE IMPACT
I created a customer journey for one of our personas, Jennifer, on getting married, to showcase in which stages Jarvis can assist Jennifer from the moment her boyfriend popped the question, until the reminiscing phase..
To test our concepts and ideas we started an Ads campaign on Facebook to promote smarter spending on daily expenditures. At first, we did not have much traction on our Ads. We then shifted our approach to focus more on major life events, particularly having a child or preparing for a wedding.
These results led to a pivot in our approach, concentrating on financial decision-making around major life events as the entry point for Jarvis.Life events are universal, crossing all countries, cultures and genders.
Initially focussing on the UK, we extended our ad campaigns into The Netherlands, Romania, Belgium, Canada and the United States.
Our recent FB Ad campaigns in 6 countries achieved a click-through rate of over 5%! This is above the industry average of 2.5-3% and shows good traction for our solution within our target group. Through our latest pivot, we have seen 175 people sign up for the Jarvis prototype over the last two weeks, with numbers increasing every day.
Jarvis is different from other solutions in its focus of its services around major life events. It provides you with personally tailored information in a proactive manner, remaining a trusted assistant available 24 hours a day. Interacting with Jarvis will be like having a conversation with your smartest friend.
We surveyed the competitive landscape and discovered numerous budgeting apps, advisory services and smart shopping platforms. We see an opportunity for Jarvis to distinguish itself from the market by being a life event navigator, offering a combination of advice, tools and recommendations through AI technology.
We believe that Jarvis has the potential to be a viable solution that can empower the financially challenged We see a window of opportunity to serve this growing customer segment. By capitalising on new AI based technologies and optimising platform thinking in our business model, Jarvis can reach a wide audience and generate considerable social and financial impact.
An incubator project with a 13-week deadline presents many a challenge. Having been introduced to our teammates within the first week of our project, we weren't only immersing ourselves in research but also getting to know one another and our shared and individual capabilities.
We got introduced to the Design Thinking Process I have mastered and worked with during previous projects, giving me the advantage and confidence to help other teammates and taking the lead when needed.
We adapted quickly to learning new skills and putting them into practice. We had some amazing results with FB campaigns (click-through ratio going to the roof, over 5%) as well as engaging potential consumers.
We discovered our core strengths and how they could be most useful to the tasks that we had to carry out. Our roles intertwined, allowing us to successfully tackle a number of important items. From a fun group to be in, to a fun and creative group to work with.
During this project, I noticed that I found it difficult to present a pre-scripted story and that I have to practice more to gain confidence in order to present in front of larger groups. Toward the end of our final presentation I would answer most questions with great confidence but I could not bring the story.
I really enjoyed working on the project, not only because I had amazing team members and we had a lot of fun during the long hours we worked, but also because we came up with quick results, we could shift fast when needed and our solution won first price on the final demo day. I could emphasise with the target audience and I believe we came up with a great concept.
I am a UX designer with a passion for creating awesome experiences on multi dimensional platforms. I love to travel and explore new things.
