Problem Space

Beyond day-to-day banking like transferring funds, paying bills and saving, more people are looking to wealth management solutions provided by banks to grow and manage their wealth. People want to secure their financial futures and they want experts to support them.

Scotiabank offers a variety of wealth management services and has highly skilled advisors to assist their clients. As clients run their busy lives, they're looking for frictionless and convenient engagement with their advisors online.

Some goals to keep in mind

Eventually, each generation's preferred habits of managing their own finance will be eclipsed by the next, and because of that it maybe really easy to lose sight of why the problem space exist. These three goals were set up so that we will always be grounded to the needs of both Scotiabank and its clienteles.

Further Research

Before tackling the problem head on, our team decided to first get some context on what is happening in the problem space. These include the a deeper research in to the audience, their habits as well as emerging trends. We found that:

During our research, two major points about the targeted clientele had to be noted.

• Millennials have the strongest sentiments to drop their financial adviser to pursue Do-It-Yourself (DIY) investing instead.
• Gen Z investors say they’re more likely to get financial advice from TikTok (34%) and YouTube (33%) than from a financial advisor (24%)

Interview

The research findings were largely inline with what we expected, now we just need a human voice connecting the dots for us. To get more coverage, the team created a set of questionnaires and split up and found a participant each to test our assumptions.

We targeted people within the Gen Z and Millennial population as they are the users most likely to change their investing habits based on social media on mobile platforms.

Initial Assumptions

Personification

Based on insights from research and interviews, we created a persona modelling the younger generation to give the problem a human context. They are at the most impressionable stage of their investment journey and following social media influencers is not sustainable as they lack long-term security and accountability for bad advice.

The team imagined Albert's typical experience when he wants to learn more about managing his finances with resources from a typical financial institution. We kept the experience map here minimal, however it serves well to address the major pain points that Albert will encounter. This also provides a good lens on what we think are good opportunities to intervene on.

Task Flow

After a brief discussion on the opportunities we have observed, the team concluded that engaging the users through the Advice+ section of Scotiabank's banking app is a great place to address the pain points. The decisions were further backed up by the fact that the younger generation tend to use their mobile devices as a central hub for banking, learning and self management.

The team rapidly devised a series of tasks and steps that could be implemented inside the Advice+ section and after linking it together, we have our task flow.

Sketches

Our task flow was able to help us determine the steps and screen necessary for the user to get achieve their goals but we still had to visually incorporate it in to the Advice+ page of the app. Each team members sketched out their ideas and shared it with the group. At the end, we agreed on a card style approach to the appointment that would show up when an financial advisor has set up a meeting with the client.

High Fidelity

After a brief discussion with the team on our sketches, we finalized our ideas on Figma. Due to the time constraint the team utilized assets captured from the app to create a high-fidelity prototype instead of starting from a low-fidelity model.

We were able to bridge our sketches with interactions that already exists within the Advice+ page of the Scotiabank mobile banking app. This accelerated our process and I personally felt that the results of this process felt like a seamless integration and carried our vision across effectively.

Learnings

Well, it was a very intense process as the sprint challenge was more or less 48 hours. We crammed in as much contextual understanding as we could.  Here are some key take-aways that is worth addressing regardless of solution and approach. As long as these points are acknowledged and set as goals to be addressed, it might be inspirations to other forms of potential solutions.

• Knowledge Barrier - Dissatisfaction comes from the knowledge barriers and specific terminology used by financial specialists.
• Personalized Experience - Customers would love to have a more personalized experience when interacting with wealth management specialists.
• Follow ups, Reminders & Summaries - Customers would love to receive follow-ups after the meetings with a short summary and some suggestions on how to further improve customer’s experience and reach their goals faster

What's Next?

Personally, I felt our solution was unique but also highly practical since it is an integration within the Advice+ app, if it does peak our client's interest, the next few steps would likely be the following:

• Conduct Usability Testing - The time constraints of this design sprint was real challenge so we have yet to test its usability.
• Practical Finance and Banking content - We aren't the experts in the world of finance, so to really make it usable, the team agreed that it needs accurate content integration.
• Video Conferencing Features- Due to the pandemic, the Millennial and Gen Z population has become even more reliant on remote technology. We envisioned additional features like video conferencing functions to facilitate remote meetings