Opportunity
Our client, a large financial institution, believed that there was an opportunity to develop products that better aligned with the experiences, wants, needs, and behavior of people entering into retirement. To do this, they wanted to understand customer beliefs and behaviors around saving for, entering into, and decumulating during retirement.
In addition to understanding pre- and current retiree financial behaviors, the client wanted to evaluate several potential retirement product concepts with participants who aligned with identified archetypes.
Role
Lead Researcher
Team Members
1 Experience Strategist
1 Behavior Change Designer
1 Project Manager
Methods
Stakeholder Interviews
Discovery Interviews
Survey
Concept Testing
Primary Objectives
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Understand stakeholder roles in retirement finances and gather assumptions and hypotheses about customer retirement mindsets and behaviors.
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Understand how people transitioning into retirement and early retirees think about retirement finance, including beliefs about what it means to be financially content, responses to and perspectives on the concept of decumulating finances, and experiences with different retirement financial products.
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Develop and evaluate the accuracy of a preliminary set of retirement finance behavioral archetypes, including identifying questions that could help point to the archetype each person ascribes to.
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Develop and gather reactions to an initial set of concepts, illustrated through storyboards, for new retirement financial products.
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Understand any correlation between identified behavioral archetypes and preferences towards certain proposed product concepts, including recommendations for refinements to each.
Deliverables
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Preliminary behavioral archetypes
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Survey and typing question set
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Concept storyboards and evaluation
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Final report detailing the relationship between behavioral archetypes and concepts, along with directional recommendations for iteration and future research
Approach
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Conduct in-depth discovery interviews with representative pre- and early retiree participants to understand their financial approach to saving for, transitioning into, and decumulating during retirement.
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Based on the interview findings, identify a set of behavioral factors that represent a spectrum of actions taken and considerations when preparing for and entering into retirement.
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Based on the behavioral factors, workshop and refine a preliminary set of behavioral archetypes, then create hypotheses around how those archetypes might react to proposed decumulation product concepts.
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Run a survey to understand whether the archetypes resonated with representative participants and to draft an initial set of questions that could be used to identify which archetype a new customer might ascribe to.
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Run a series of decision trees through SPSS to understand any correlation between alignment with archetype and responses to identifying questions.
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Run a interviews and concept tests with the decumulation product storyboards to gather initial reactions, further refine the archetypes, and identify any correlation between the archetypes and concept preferences.
Client Impact
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Deep, nuanced insight into financial behaviors, motivations, and barriers leading up to and during early retirement, including core concerns and considerations that factored into the financial decisions participants made.
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A preliminary set of behavioral archetypes, to be further refined through future research, that inform how customers think about decumulating their assets in retirement and indicate how they are likely to behave when making financial decisions.
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Clear direction on crafting, presenting, discussing, and positioning financial products to speak to the beliefs and experiences of different retirement behavioral archetypes.
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Guidance on creating a screening system for assigning new and existing customers to a behavioral archetype based on their responses to a question set.
