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Using psychology to change behavior

HOW TO HELP OUR USERS CHANGE THEIR SPENDING HABITS

 

2-DAY HACKATHON
Worked in a 5-person team to create a working prototype of the future of banking

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WON THIRD PLACE
Presented in front of BMO’s leaders of technology, business and design to win 3rd place.

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WORKED WITH IBM
Not only did I participate in the Hackathon, I also helped organize and design for the event.

 
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The Problem

On a weekend in November, I organized a team of 5 to participate in the BMO Hackathon. Our prompt was:

40% of BMO consumers do not hav enough money to put aside to manage an unforeseen $500 expense. How can BMO help?

We also were provided a list of APIs that we could leverage to get an idea of what we can build. We didn’t have to link the APIs together within the 2 day timeframe but at least build a working prototype and talk out the idea.

 

Leveraging existing processes

So we took a look at some of the APIs that we could leverage. One of them included a feature that had just launched, which was the use of “insights” by taking existing customer transactions to generate statistics and surfacing it to the user. However, there was no overwhelming change to user behavior.

Taking a look at the old corporate site and all the different pages that would be required to be templated.

So we asked some basic questions about these APIs.

IF BMO had this many different contracts and features that were launching, can we leverage them together in an innovative way?If we leaned into our existing investments, and tied them together, what  product would come out?If we met our users where they are, in the secure logged in state, what kind of teaching moment could we bring to them?

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Tying things together with Psychology

Use our knowledge of breaking habits and behavior and apply it to user experience. Everyone knows how easy it is to set a goal, but the trick is to FOLLOWING THROUGH. 

The feedback loop for changing behavior looks something like this. We wanted to leverage the “REWARD” aspect of the feedback loop:

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Our solution

An in-app solution that identifies each user’s individual spending personality, teaching customers on WHY they spend and helping them change for GOOD.

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  1. Identify Cues

We do the heavy lifting by first creating 5 persons of spending. Then we ask the user to describe their relationship with money. Leveraging Watson Persona and Text A.I., we can scrub the text/audio and match their descriptions to a persona.

Once a user can map their spending to a persona and trends in spending, they can start framing their spending into patterns that can be changed.

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2. Change Their Routine

Now that the customers know their “spending persona”, they are more conscious of the patterns in their spending.

We continue to push them towards self-awareness by displaying their spending habits and also map their FUTURE spending through our BMO insights engine.

Once users identify the habits that they would like to improve/remove, they will get an email that allows them to unsubscribe from each of their pre

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3. Get Rewarded

On top of the reduction in bad spending habits, we also want to encourage the good.

This means even though the user has unsubscribed from the service, we as a bank will continue to help take the SAME amount of money out per month and put it towards a Savings account.

This means direct profits for customers and for BMO’s business.

 
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The results

We developed a working front-end prototype of the app (without all the backend calls and APIs), the team presented to major leaders in the Business, Design and Tech verticals. We then won third place among over 11+ teams and 120 employees.