Moderator: John Chapman, Owen James Group
Expert: Dominic Baliszewski, Momentum
Key issues for participants prior to the session:
- What are we missing about customers that they don't engage with the FS industry?
- As an industry we need to attract younger customers.
- We need to improve the financial education of the nation.
- The industry is not “set up” to serve the customer – we make things difficult.
- We need to provide insights for educational content.
- It's amazing how little people know about what to do with money.
- There is a feeling that robo-advice will disrupt the industry.
Key discussion points during the session:
- People often think about budgeting for short-term issues, but completely forget pension savings.
- People are confused with the way financial articles are written – we need to improve the way we communicate. We need to be more simple with our language, reduce acronyms and help people understand their finances. There is too much information that is not personalised, it causes confusion, but people don't know what they want.
- Most content, whether this be online or elsewhere is too focused on a specific problem where people have more general issues e.g. a person might receive some content that they should save more, so they think about saving money, but when they get home they hear that paying off their credit cards is the most important thing to do….. so they are confused. How do we help people aggregate information, while keeping it simple?
- Who do people trust for their financial information? Martin Lewis, mainly!
- We need to provide simple solutions, but we have to keep in mind the financial promotion rules.
- The younger generation do not get the practical financial education they need. Perhaps there is a role in targeting parents to help with their children's financial education.
- As an industry, we need to do more to fill the advice gap. We need to get people financially engaged. Gamification and story-telling could be key elements to achieving customer engagement.
The outcome:
Positive outcome from discussion - technology has a huge role to play in achieving customer engagement across all segments, but it has to be fun, engaging and easy to understand.
