Transforming Traditions: RBS's Digital Journey

Challenger banks began threatening the dominance of big banking groups soon after they were founded. RBS, one of the UK’s largest banking groups, was particularly worried about losing young affluent customers to these new banks. After being impressed by our earlier internal proposition, Moment, we were asked to help them launch a new digital banking platform.

We created Mimo, an app which would help customers budget, remind them of the financial tasks they need to do and provide proactive and personal insights into their money, looking at their bills or day-to-day spending, as well as insurance, subscriptions and utilities.

Discovery

We were initially contracted for a short discovery piece of work. This was to build on our existing research from Moment, develop a realistic proposition and pitch the idea back to the client to secure the contract to build the proposition.

At the start of this discovery piece of work, we set up a 20 person panel with RBS and non-RBS customers from across England and Scotland. The panelists had a medium to high income . We conducted research with this panel on a fortnightly basis through a mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods. We asked panelists to maintain a diary study throughout this period which helped us develop a detailed and intimate understanding of the stresses associated with money management. In order to give our findings a greater gravitas, particularly with the senior leadership at RBS, we corroborated the findings from our panelists with large scale surveys of between 1,500 and 2,000 respondents. We uncovered the following key themes during this research:

Feeling time poor: When ranking things that cause them stress, our panelists and survey respondents were 4x more likely to be stressed and/or worried about things relating to being time poor rather than financially poor. People’s perception is that they are too time poor to get everything done, which is often caused by how they choose to spend their time.

Deferring tasks: People prioritise other activities over admin and finance based tasks. It then becomes increasingly daunting and overwhelming. From surveys and card sorting exercises we found consistently that the most disliked tasks were related to areas such as insurance, bills and banking.

Struggling with admin: People use fragmented methods to manage their admin and finances; sharing these tasks increases the complexities. There was no clear tool that was used to manage admin with most people using a variety of methods to complete different tasks and finding workarounds when their needs were not met.

Losing track of documents: People like the peace of mind of document storage but have difficulties in managing it because it’s spread across various platforms, from emails, cloud storage, paper documents in filing cabinets and more. 81% claim to have all their important documents filed but 30% of said they regularly had difficult finding documents.

Gravitating towards banking apps: People worry about keeping track of their money and as a result are frequently engaging with banking applications for peace of mind and to enforce the feeling on being in control. The most frustrating money related admin tasks are keeping on top of payments and checking that they aren’t overspending and that keeping on track of saving. These are the two factors driving people to check their balances frequently, around half of our panelists were checking their banking apps multiple times a day.

Talking money with family: People are seeking discussing finances with family as they look for unbiased advice. Over 50% of survey respondents listed family as the most trusted source of financial advice.