Helping ASB Support the Financial Wellbeing of all New Zealanders

Most customers don’t think about financial wellbeing — they are focused on making day-to-day money decisions. Making daily decisions is hard for customers when they do not have the necessary information. Traditional money management tools can be hard to setup, don’t necessarily provide the visibility needed to make decisions, and only support manual money systems that break when things change. When this is true, customers can’t make informed decisions to improve their financial wellbeing. Staff try to bridge the gap through guidance conversations — but aren’t always setup to consistently navigate these conversations with customers, or triage them to the right support.

We designed a strategy that embeds financial wellbeing into the system people use everyday. In practice, this meant designing a connected everyday banking experience that helps people make everyday money decisions by answering the key questions they have about their finances, in the places they already go. But strategy is nothing without implementation. We started where we could have impact at scale — designing, building and launching a shared screen experience that put financial wellbeing at the centre of over 75,000 conversations that happen each year in ASB banking advice centres across New Zealand.

For customers — Improved confidence and ability to take action towards improving their financial wellbeing, without being an expert. Reducing everyday money stress. Building trust that the bank has their back. Staff — Gave them the tools to have consistent, confident, efficient conversations — so they can focus on holistic customer needs, rather than taking notes, or worrying about the next question. The organisation — the strategy provided a framework for connecting tools and streamlining experiences across the bank to deliver on their purpose. Launching the in-branch conversation delivered immediate value, and set them up to apply learnings to future digital experiences.

Both the overall strategy and shared screen experience we launched were underpinned by a framework that was designed to help customers make informed decisions, and take steps towards improving their financial wellbeing. It enabled customers to; See where they’re at — understand their current position, identify needs, goals and gaps Spot significance — receive proactive guidance about where to focus their efforts Easily take action — contextually surface the right tools, processes or people to make taking the next step easy A shared screen experience that embodied this framework is now live in branches across New Zealand, and has seen an improvement in customers taking action towards their finances — with 67% of customers taking actions on the plan they co-created with bankers. “I have never been treated with so much respect by a Bank before. Feel as if we are not a just a customer number” “Good explanation of various options. Took time to make sure I understood what was being discussed. Very thorough” “I love that we shifted the emphasis to educating our customers to help accelerate their financial progress”