User Research, UX Design, Service Design
5 Service Designers at Royal College of Art
6 Months
Isla is a B2B2C planet centric, retirement planning service which leverages visualisation and gamification to get millennials to engage with their pensions and take conscious decisions. This project was in partnership with Aegon UK - a leading pension provider. I was part of a five member team where I mainly focused on the Service & UX design.
When you enroll in a workplace pension scheme your money is automatically invested in a default pension fund.This default pension fund is chosen to suit the average staff member. It's a one size fits all approach, where the investment solution doesn't necessarily line up to suit individual values. Moreover, once the pension is set up most people don’t look back, which means 95% of people end up staying in their pension scheme’s default fund whether they were planning to or not.
Currently, 12.2 million millennials in the UK hold 60% of pension accounts, yet there’s low engagement, with 25% never checking and 23% checking only annually. Moreover, £3 trillion is invested in UK pension funds, with £88 billion funding non-sustainable sectors like coal and petroleum.
11 in-depth Interviews
1. Disconnect
Between today and tomorrow.
Between lifestyle choices and financial choices.
2. Intangibility
The future is hard to imagine.
Don’t like to think about growing old and retiring.
3.Lack of engagement
Pensions are too boring and complicated.
Never check my pension.
4. All about returns
Care about returns more than sustainability.
Care about short term goals more than long term.
Based on our interviews we created archetypes based on the views of sustainable investing and levels of engagement with pensions we created archetypes. We decided to focus on the passive and ambivalent archetypes.
We used crazy 8s to brainstorm ideas that would address each of the key insights. We came up with a bunch of ideas which we then used against the matrix to figure out which concepts were the most feasible.Once we had our 8 concepts, we decided to validate our hypothesis by concept testing against potential users and industry experts.Which helped us narrow down to our top 3 concepts.
We did A/B testing with 8 potential users and 5 aegon experts. We used this to narrow down and refine our features.
Isla is our retirement planning service. We focus on visualising your future in the form of a personalised ever-growing island to increase engagement and financial literacy amongst millennials. Isla promotes sustainable investment and aims to motivate millennials to save for their future. It’s a B2B2C model targeting working professionals.
- Help people clarify their future retirement goals through surveys and questions, and encourage them to envision a desirable future.This helps people to connect the present and the future.
- Tackles present bias: This makes it easier for them to make changes in their current behaviour.
When people have a clear vision of their future, they're not just investing for their own wellbeing but also shaping the broader environment they'll live in.
- AI-powered Island Build: Personalised creation of your island.
- Visualising people’s future will help people make better financial decisions.
- Through gamification and visualisation, show the impact of the choices people make today and the world tomorrow.
- This solves the biggest challenges: disconnection, intangibility, lack of engagement, lack of connection
- Compare various pension plans, display detailed fund information, and their environmental impact to aid people in making behavioural changes
- Seeing the environmental impact of funds will drive people to choose the more sustainable one. Challenges status- quo bias.
- Quantifying the relationship between money and climate impact.
- Building connections between people, pension and the planet.
- See all your pension pots in one place.
- Track goals which are created based on your quiz.
- Forecasting your retirement time and retirement assets, as well as potential carbon savings.
- AI suggestions, based on your basic information and goals.
- AI chatbot which tells scenarios.
Show collective efforts and create a sense of community .
Exploring other people’s islands to seeing what they are doing differently will motivate people to do better.
Interacting with islands can further engage people to take action.
£36,000
average pension pot in the UK
£44 billion
pension pots of 10% of millennial workforce
£3 trillion
could be invested in clean energy
19 tons CO2e
saved per person per year by switching funds
23 million tons CO2e
saved per year by 10% of millennials switching funds
300 million tons CO2e
saved per year if everyone in the UK
switches to green funds
- Switches from the default to a
sustainable fund
- Increases her pension contribution
(~15% in total)
- Earns better returns
(0.54 to 1.91% more -Morningstar)
- More engagement with the dashboard
(checks up to 8 times a year)
- Reads our educational content to enhance financial literacy (50-80% completion rate)
- People save enough for retirement (currently need 6x times average pot)
- Build a sense of collective power within our community of users
- Grow awareness that our financial choices have consequences on the planet
There are a multitude of players along with Isla in the financial wellbeing and retirement planning industry. While these competitors range from major players to emerging startups focused on sustainability, Isla's unique proposition lies in its commitment to combining climate-conscious decision-making with a retirement plan that meets individual financial goals.
In July 2020, Smart Animated Pension Walkthrough was deployed in a beta trial to approximately 8,000 scheme members and it received a CSAT score of 87%.
According to Morningstar, across 6 different categories of funds over a 5-year period, sustainable funds consistently outperformed their standard counterparts by 0.54-1.91%.
While most Brits are well aware of how to reduce their carbon footprint through changing their behaviours, Scottish Widows’ 2023 report states that 67% don’t know how to switch to a ‘green pension’.
A study by the International Longevity Centre reveals that, on average, UK savers improve their pension wealth by £30,991 by taking advice..
Isla operates in the financial well-being sector, The mission integration of our platform reinforces the triple bottom line - profitability, people, and the planet - by aligning our corporate strategy with environmental and social impact goals.
For generating revenue, Isla has a subscription model which targets employers for platform access to their employees and secure commissions from promoting sustainable pension fund options.The business model will also be supported by surplus streams generated from premium paid features like 1:1 financial advice and AI scenarios.
Isla’s market penetration strategy involves multiple key partnerships. Collaborations with pension providers will be essential to access financial data for user pensions and to integrate sustainable investment options. Financial advisors will serve as a customer channel, expanding Isla's reach within their client base.
- Greater understanding of viability and business model.
- Understanding how revenue impacts product features.
- Demonstrate that a constraint does not prevent feasibility then, discuss coping strategies.
- We are not designing solutions, but designing testable hypothesis.
