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Retirement Plan

Retirement can feel too far away to plan for, and life keeps getting in the way. We wanted customers to see where they stand and take steps to be in control of their finances at every stage of life. We are designing a self-guided retirement planning tool to help them do this.

Role: Service Design Lead
Country: Singapore
Status: In Progress

Illustration of a customer weighing up life events beside a phone showing her life plan: assets, shortfall and a retirement target

Reframe the problem

The brief was to build a retirement planning tool like an existing one used by Relationship Managers (RMs). We reframed this in two ways.

First, from an RM-led conversation to a self-guided experience: we distilled which information matters most to capture, so customers get the same quality of guidance on their own.

Second, from the usual buyers of wealth and protection products to people at every stage of life, such as those new to the workforce and retirees: how might the bank help them manage their finances with confidence?

Understand the current state

We studied how the RM retirement planning tool works and which other solutions exist in the market. We then mapped the customer experience to mimic a guided conversation.

The Relationship Managers’ retirement planning tool beside the customer journey, from intent through to review and monitor

Validate ideas early, learn and iterate

Working with product designers, we prototyped the experience and tested it with customers through one-to-one interviews and surveys. We use both because interviews give us context on how customers think, while surveys let us stress-test usability. After each round of learnings, we distilled the essence and iterated, meeting customer needs as they became clearer.

One-to-one customer interviews with the prototype, alongside survey results on the financial planning tool

We learnt from customers

Without guidance, customers find it hard to consolidate their net worth across many places and to estimate a retirement lifestyle that allows for inflation.
Customers need help reading the projection graph and figures, a role which RMs currently explain.
Customers expect personalised next steps: things they can do at no extra cost first, better products to close the gaps, and services they can use.
Trust came up as a theme: how might we blend digital convenience with human expertise to earn it?

We also worked out a framework to show the product team where AI could help customers across the whole planning journey, drawing on the learnings and the fact that how customers plan doesn’t fundamentally change.

Six ways customers imagine AI chat supporting their end-to-end financial planning journey

Launch and measure

Launch and results will be shared once the project goes live.

Challenges faced

This project is still in progress, and its challenges are already shaping how I’ll approach the next one.

Identify the project phase clearly. We went straight into design while discovery questions were still open. Next time, I will guide the team with a customer journey map, so everyone sees the open questions first and builds on a shared view.
Involve RMs as experts. Testing the projection graph and numbers turned out to be a heavy usability task. We planned to take the prototype to RMs for an expert view, but it didn’t happen.