Isla is a B2B2C planet centric, retirement planning service which leverages visualisation and gamification to get millennials to engage with their pensions and take conscious decisions. This project was in partnership with Aegon UK - a leading pension provider. I was part of a five member team where I mainly focused on the Service & UX design.
User Research, UX Design, Service Design
5 Service Designers at Royal College of Art
6 Months
When you enroll in a workplace pension scheme your money is automatically invested in a default pension fund. This default pension fund is chosen to suit the average staff member. It's a one size fits all approach, where the investment solution doesn't necessarily line up to suit individual values. Moreover, once the pension is set up most people don’t look back, which means 95% of people end up staying in their pension scheme’s default fund whether they were planning to or not.
Currently, 12.2 million millennials in the UK hold 60% of pension accounts, yet there’s low engagement, with 25% never checking and 23% checking only annually. Moreover, £3 trillion is invested in UK pension funds, with £88 billion funding non-sustainable sectors like coal and petroleum.
11 in-depth Interviews with working millenials to understand their financial and sustainability values.
1. Disconnect
Between today and tomorrow.
Between lifestyle choices and financial choices.
2. Intangibility
The future is hard to imagine.
Don’t like to think about growing old and retiring.
3. Lack of engagement
Pensions are too boring and complicated.
Never check my pension.
4. All about returns
Care about returns more than sustainability.
Care about short term goals more than long term.
Using our interviews, we created archetypes based on sustainability investing views and levels of pension engagement. We decided to focus on the passive and ambivalent archetypes.
We used crazy eights to brainstorm ideas that would address each of the key insights. After coming up with a wide range of ideas, we used the matrix to determine which concepts were most feasible. Once we had our 8 concepts, we decided to validate our hypothesis by concept testing against potential users and industry experts. This helped us narrow down to our top 3 concepts.
We did A/B testing with 8 potential users and 5 aegon experts. We used this to narrow down and refine our features.
Isla is our retirement planning service. We focus on visualising your future in the form of a personalised ever-growing island to increase engagement and financial literacy amongst millennials. Isla promotes sustainable investment and aims to motivate millennials to save for their future. It’s a B2B2C model targeting working professionals.
- Help people clarify their future retirement goals through surveys and questions, and encourage them to envision a desirable future. This helps people to connect the present and the future.
- Tackles present bias: This makes it easier for them to make changes in their current behaviour. When people have a clear vision of their future, they're not just investing for their own wellbeing but also shaping the broader environment they'll live in.
- AI-powered Island Build: Personalised creation of your island.
- Visualising people’s future will help people make better financial decisions.
- Through gamification and visualisation, show the impact of the choices people make today and the world tomorrow.
- This solves the biggest challenges around disconnection, intangibility, lack of engagement & lack of connection.
- Compare various pension plans, display detailed fund information, and their environmental impact to aid people in making behavioural changes.
- Seeing the environmental impact of funds will drive people to choose the more sustainable one. Challenges status-quo bias.
- Quantifying the relationship between money and climate impact.
- Building connections between people, pension and the planet.
- See all your pension pots in one place.
- Track goals which are created based on your quiz.
- Forecasting your retirement time and retirement assets, as well as potential carbon savings.
- AI suggestions, based on your basic information and goals.
- AI chatbot which predicts different financial scenarios.
- Show collective efforts and create a sense of community.
- Exploring other people’s islands to see what they are doing differently will motivate people to do better.
- Interacting with islands can further engage people to take action.
£36,000
Average pension pot in the UK
19 tons CO2e
Saved per person per year by switching funds
£44 billion
Pension pots of 10% of millennial workforce
23 million tons CO2e
Saved per year by 10% of millennials switching funds
£3 trillion
Could be invested in clean energy
300 million tons CO2e
Saved per year if everyone in the UK
switches to green funds
- Switches from the default to a
sustainable fund
- Increases her pension contribution
(~15% in total)
- Earns better returns
(0.54 to 1.91% more -Morningstar)
- More engagement with the dashboard
(checks up to 8 times a year)
- Reads our educational content to enhance financial literacy (50-80% completion rate)
- People save enough for retirement (currently need 6x times average pot)
- Build a sense of collective power within our community of users
- Grow awareness that our financial choices have consequences on the planet
There are a multitude of players along with Isla in the financial wellbeing and retirement planning industry. While these competitors range from major players to emerging startups focused on sustainability, Isla's unique proposition lies in its commitment to combining climate-conscious decision-making with a retirement plan that meets individual financial goals.
In July 2020, Smart Animated Pension Walkthrough was deployed in a beta trial to approximately 8,000 scheme members and it received a CSAT score of 87%.
According to Morningstar, across 6 different categories of funds over a 5-year period, sustainable funds consistently outperformed their standard counterparts by 0.54-1.91%.
Research shows that, on average, UK savers improve their pension wealth by £30,991 by taking advice.
While most Brits are well aware of how to reduce their carbon footprint through changing their behaviours, Scottish Widows’ 2023 report states that 67% don’t know how to switch to a ‘green pension’.
Isla operates in the financial well-being sector. With mission integration, we align corporate strategy with environmental and social impact goals in order to reinforce the triple bottom line - profitability, people, and the planet.
For generating revenue, Isla has a subscription model which targets employers for platform access to their employees and secures commissions by promoting sustainable pension fund options. The business model will also be supported by surplus streams generated from premium paid features like 1:1 financial advice and AI scenarios.
Isla’s market penetration strategy involves multiple key partnerships. Collaborations with pension providers will be essential to access financial data for user pensions and to integrate sustainable investment options. Financial advisors will serve as a customer channel, expanding Isla's reach within their client base.
- Understanding that constraints don't prevent feasibility
- The aim is not to design solutions, rather to design testable hypotheses.
- Learning about business models and product viability.
- Understanding how revenue impacts product features.