Banking Company

Empowering teens with financial literacy through mobile banking

PNC BANK

Project in brief

Teenagers face critical financial decisions yet remain an underserved demographic in the finance industry. PNC Bank asked us to come up with a better way to engage with them.

Many parents can't introducing their teens to banking since they are unable to adequately explain finance themselves. We designed a digital service that created a safe environment for teens to learn about banking and experiment with money. With parent-controlled debit cards and an accompanying app, we balanced teens empowerment with parent oversight.

My Role

Service designer and user researcher

Timeline

7 weeks, completed on January 2018

Team

4 Design Students

The Solution

How the service works

Diagram explaining the pocket pal service for the parent and the teen to interact with PNC Bank

THE APP

For the family to spend together

Teen Views

Screen designs for teen view, includes four screens

Parent Views

Process

Research

Cash is king when it comes to teens

To understand financial conversations teens and their parents have, we interviewed 12 teens and 5 parents.

To no one's surprise, we found that for PNC to offer any service for teens, parents have to act as a point of entry and a mediator to the education.

Research Findings

1.
Teens prefer immediate and tangible connections regarding their money
Despite being used to using digital services, teens prefer interacting with a person when dealing with financial matters.
2.
Teens  don’t understand why they should keep track of their spending
Teens kept receipts for record keeping but don't refer back to it. They often practiced saving receipts because they anticipated their parents asking them about their purchases.
3.
Parents assume that their kids are learning about finances at school
Though parents wanted their teens to make mistakes and learn from mistakes while under their care, they expressed uncertainty and a desire for help when it came to choosing what to teach their teen. One concern was not knowing how to communicate more complex financial concepts in an easily understandable way.
4.
Parents want to have oversight on their teens’ spending
Parents often gave cash to their teens because they felt like they were more in control of their teen's spending.  However, they didn't necessarily track how much they actually gave.

Defining the audience

Using personas to summarize what not to solve for

To scope our projects to focus on a subset of problems we found out during our research, we created a parent and a teen persona.

Testing concept ideas

Speed dating ideas help to define the boundaries of an 'acceptable' service

To test what was needed by our audiences, we created storyboards and tested them with passersby on the street. [add finding here]

Iterating on the interface

Banking on the basics before experimenting

We tested our initial wireframes to see if users felt confident in the banking app. After building the information architecture, we started prototyping the learning center and finance curriculum.

Finalizing the service

Investing in learning

Interaction Design

Independent yet Connected

I mapped a parent an teen flow highlighting where communication or notifications are essential, especially between the two users.

Design decisions

The details make or break the experience for teens

Map the physical and the digital clearly with a skeuomorphic card

We clearly mapped the card balance to the physical card because teens needed tangible artifacts. Additionally, parents wanted to make sure that the teens understood the link between digital and physical spending.

Push relevant information through a personable companion

Teens wanted guidance when interacting with money. They did things that they believed was financially responsible— like keeping receipts— without knowing why. We named the app Pocket Pal after the personable character deliver information and notifications along the teen's journey.

Some of the emotions we explored for the Pocket Pal dino

Incentivize learning for teens by unlocking spending potential though classes

Teens have a learning center in the app that offers bite-sized financial information. As the teen progresses through the lessons, they unlock spending potential set by their parent.

Design decisions

Oversight is the name of the game for parents

Give parents a quick overview

Parents wanted to know in which categories their teen spent money. This screen provides an digestible summary of teen’s daily spending. When teen passes the limits set by the parent (eg. spent too much money in Fortnite), parents receive warning. The total amount spent by the teen is easily accessible to the parent at all times.

Give parents control through spending limits & notifications

Parents wanted to have oversight over their teen’s spending, especially during the early days of using digital money. The parental controls enable them to granular restrictions.

Provide ease when transferring money

All of the parents we interviewed preferred card over cash for daily spending, but children still received cash. Pocket Pal provided the ease of digital banking.

reflections

Bringing together a full understanding of a service and an accompanying app was a learning process

This project received positive feedback from PNC Bank executives that reviewed our final ideas and they were really interested in how the characters could be helpful.