Fun and easy to use "financial competence training & knowledge service" for people 50+
8. Innovative product ideas that solve the customer pain
Innovation Need
Fun and easy to use "financial competence training & knowledge service" for people 50+
- Brygge GmbH
- Very responsive
- Posted by
Desired outcome
Develop technical concepts to easily educate older adults 50+ about financial knowledge, resilience, fraud prevention in a neutral and personalized way that does not create fear or insecurities and does not feel like "studying".
We want to offer a solution that is advertising free, personalized based on the users skills, experiences, life & financial situation and prior knowledge. We want to control the content used for answering questions or at least provide new wording and generate extracts of public available content. The content creation should however be highly automated and scalable for a small startup like us with limited resources.
The users should be able to learn on their own, in their preferred method and time, having different content formats to chose from. Ideally, there will be triggers to motivate the user to "use the tool" without their need of "I need to learn something about xyz"
Overall the learning experience should feel naturally and playful / easy. Therefore we prefer a conversational concept - not simply providing a catalog of topics a user can choose from and a one size fits all content library. With the use of AI, NLP and other technologies, we envision a new learning service that feels to every user as if it was just created for them personally. It should create wow effects and the desire to tell friends and family about it. The content and experience needs to be trustworthy and safe so that the user has no concerns of sharing personal information.
Initial Problem Description
The majority of people do not like to deal with their finances, it is boring or a burden, especially if you believe that you don't really know what to do. Often people blindly rely on their banks' advice (which is not neutral and aims to generate a profit for the bank), finfluencers who usually also don't advise neutrally or worst case they become victims of financial scams or exploitations. With age, the risk of receiving incorrect advice or feeling overwhelmed by financial decisions increases. In addition, a pressing concern is the rising number of scams targeting consumers, particularly seniors - which will only increase due to scammers using AI. When a person googles a question or financial product, there are way too many answers and it is difficult to differentiate between facts, advertisement and scams. On top of this, older people tend to believe that they are too old to learn something new, especially if it is digital or technology based. They usually underestimate their skills. They also believe that it takes a lot of time to learn something / to build their own opinion and thus either don't take actions at all or follow other people's advice - not knowing that this person sometimes has its own agenda. Banks only offer a one-size fits all online banking and financial advice which does not address the individual problems and needs of its especially older customers. Nobody addresses how divers the target group is and how different the services / product or financial advice needs to be based on the users individual situation. The spectrum of our target group is huge/diverse, talking of types, such as (1) Total deniers of digitalisation vs. going with general tech trends, (2) Total deniers of online banking for data privacy reasons vs online banking users, (3) Financially overwhelmed vs. good financial resilience, (4) Susceptible to scams/consumer traps/fake bargains vs. careful and smart in dealing with financial chances, (5) limited financial literacy/information about financial/market facts vs. very well informed about finances, (6) Lonely <-> well-connected with family and possibly caring for 75+ relatives, (7) suffering from old-age poverty vs. wealthy. The goal of Brygge is to use personalization and customization (powered by data and technology) in order to enable people to handle their own finances in a new way: humanely, independently and confidently. We are aiming for personalization & customization options without burdening the users with difficult up front decisions about what they need and want. We believe the use of e.g. NLP, generative AI and data science can help to a) detect behavorial or knowledge related patterns and b) provide individual service and knowledge transfer based on the individual needs.
Context
Banks and financial advisors seem to be "demographically blind", failing to address the challenges faced by Germany's elderly population. This neglect needs to be mitigated, especially considering that Germany, with 23 % of its population aged 65 and above (approximately 18 million), is one of the oldest countries in the world. Almost every 2nd German is 50 and above. And the demographic shift is fueled by declining fertility rates and increasing longevity. This is not just a German problem but can be seen in the majority of countries worldwide.
Our current live product provides banking with comfort for German speakers in their 2nd half of life, i.e. who are 50plus, male/female with our without prior online-banking experiences.
We are the only open banking fintech in EU that focuses on the target group 50+.
We provide a banking solution but also an academy where we share financial knowledge, instructions, fraud warnings etc in a written format. We currently only personalize this based on 2 very broad personas - one who had prior online banking experiences and one who hasn't used online banking yet and thus might only start with us.
We plan to offer this academy content also as videos or audio files, and also want to offer group learning sessions for these topics.
The interaction with our written content is low and we need
a) more personalization to not bore or overwhelm the users with the content, only provide what is needed - so easy, non intrusive ways to test current knowledge and interests
b) less resource intensive processes to generate new materials (automated but with quality and review mechanism by providing the initial content sources)
c) less resource intensive processes to generate different formats of the content
c) a more human / conversational interaction with the user
d) the option for the user to decide what he wants to learn, focus on and how to test his knowledge
e) practical exercises to put the learned content into practice
f) more features that create fun and stickiness to increase interaction
In order to also increase brand and product awareness, we see the "educational / learning service" as a great marketing story and easy way to get people to gain trust in our brand and products and interested and prepared to use our banking service. It will provide another added value for using Brygge and a USP for us, in the market since banks do not offer anything like this..
Connection to cross-cutting areas
The initial Call that INDUSAC is connected with "Call: A HUMAN-CENTRED AND ETHICAL DEVELOPMENT OF DIGITAL [AND INDUSTRIAL] TECHNOLOGIES 2021 (HORIZON-CL4-2021-HUMAN-01)" is a perfect description of the Brygge purpose mission as a profit-for-impact fintech: Brygge fights ageism in the financial (technology) industry by providing banking with comfort, i.e. equipping users with human-centric banking, ad-free financial tips, and anti-rip-off features for lifelong participation and optimistic handling of their finances.
For many years now financial technology innovations have centered around the same group(s) of people – young, finance-savvy, mid- or high earners, following every digital trend. Why? Well, the statistics regarding software developers* are clear: 92 % of them are men, 76.6 % are White or European, while 4.3 % are aged 55plus and another 4.3% have a physical difference, the majority being blind or having difficulty seeing. What about banks and insurers? Well, there are not even such statistics to quote from. Diversity awareness is still in its infancy in the industry.
Brygge is a fintech innovation for German speakers who have not grown up with digitization. Who find financial stuff rather boring or online banking annoying – or people who are not even using banking online yet. Who sometimes get annoyed because they fall into bargain traps or do not recognize an online fake shop at first sight. People who are maybe stressed by their finances or perhaps on top by caring for the finances of their family's elders, and face new financial questions in their 2nd half of life, that means we target people aged 50plus. Brygge provides Banking with comfort for them.
So we connect with digitalisation as well as general sustainability, as we foster the S in ESG. Growth for us means successfully scaling our measurable impact by means of KPIs based on 8 SDG targets (and 4 SDG goals: ).
Input
We can provide information on the general context, statistics and UX guidelines for the target group, as well as lessons learned from our current users. We can explain or provide guidelines what we consider good, relevant, neutral (financial) content and how the tone and language needs to be used for our user. We can also state what sources for content we would want to use in Germany.
However, we would try not to influence the team. We would prefer the students and research team to come up with various ways and ideas to use for example AI and NLP. to address the problem that Brygge has limited resources to manually create Brygge specific content (according to our standards) for this learning service.
Some background to our current product:
- Brygge works with every German bank (no bank switch necessary, uses open banking technology)
- users connect their own and/or bank accounts that they take care of via power of attorney (tandem-banking). We cover checking accounts, savings / cash accounts and credit cards. We currently do not allow to connect securities / trading accounts - technically it would be possible though.
- we offer a responsive browser based application (no download needed) with an age friendly but modern usability and clear, easy to understand language
- we provide independent financial/consumer knowledge matched to the users' everyday life. While scrolling through the transactions. the user sees certain knowledge or warning reports. We use the transaction details, payee, amount, transaction category, etc to match our content. We do not profile the users.
- We share warnings about financial risks in reports but also provide warnings when the user sends a money transfer to an eg. non DE IBAN or to a company that received
- our application is 100% ad-free, i.e. we do not sell financial products as a solution to risks
- we offer a monthly subscription, which is affordable for everyone, as one pays € 0,- / 4,- / 8,- or 12,- for our monthly subscription depending on the regular monthly income. The user has a free trial period which ends automatically.
- our academy is (except of the transactional advice) available also to users without online banking access / non paying Brygge users
Expectations
Explore amongst other the AI & NLP trends and see what learning / educational trends can be applied to our target group and the product expectations . Be open minded and creative. Be specific and elaborate on the proposed solutions specifics. Don't just say you will offer a chatbot based on openAI's ChatGPT. Think outside of the box and especially, try to see this from the perspective of a 50+ person. Talk to your parents, grand-parents to get a first hand understanding of how they inform themselves, how they learn, what they find easy or fun to use, when they get into the "zone" and don't even realize when they learn something / spend time doing something. Also check how different they might be from your team members families.
Don't limit your ideas to the German market or the current status quo of Brygge.
You should use the European financial literarcy framework (by the OECD) as a guideline for relevant topics. Understand that our target group has different life experiences, technical skills and knowledge: The product should work for all users, independent of their level of prior knowledge, so from absolute beginners to more advanced people - you can exclude "expert levels" though.
The learning application should be based on proven best practices for sharing knowledge with seniors, including different learning styles and formats and UX guidelines for older people. Evaluate if gamification is something that you would want to use but if, consider that it could be something optional / customizable for the users .
The service should work as a standalone application but for now we assume that is available only for signed up Brygge users and thus should have a similar UI and UX. It must be browser based.
Parts off the content should also be usable for Facebook, Instagram and a youtube channel as teaser content to generate signups.
Users should be able to also share their results and certain content to non.users to advertise their progress, results and promote the service.
Consider other possible community aspects and how this could interact with other services or academy offers (e.g. the group training sessions, offline meetings / events, train the trainer concept, etc)
Desired Team Profile
An interdisciplinary team from psychology, technology, finance, adult education, design and UX would be ideal for us - we are aware that this is certainly difficult to realize. So we are open for teams from all of these backgrounds.
The most important skills for this job are actually independent of academic background, i.e. analytical skills, empathy, interest in user centric design and adult education, and the ability to think outside the box.
Additional Information
There are financial literarcy or competence initiatives for children and young adults by NGOs or startups and some for women. But older adults and especially seniors are usually getting neglected in Germany.
There are some startups that use Chatbots based on ChatGPT to train older adults digital skills (how to use their smartphone, tablet, certain apps, video calls,, etc) but nothing age-friendly or neutral for online banking or financial knowledge in general yet. Banks don't share a lot of neutral advice, knowledge, as they usually try to blindly sell their products and services.
We haven't done an in depth market analysis for the EU market / UK / US for financial literarcy tools for older adults yet.
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About Brygge GmbH
Brygge is a profit-for-impact fintech from Germany, fighting ageism and other discrimination factors in the financial (technology) industry by providing banking with comfort, i.e. equipping users with human-centric banking, ad-free financial tips, and anti-rip-off features for lifelong participation and optimistic handling of their finances.
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