SVA Thesis Week 6: Midterm

Topic of This Week’s Posts

• Research & Insights
• 3 Concepts

Research

6 weeks later, it was finally time to translate my findings into cogent insights to guide ideation!

To reiterate, my research goal was to map how the methodologies and behaviors of non-financial professionals differed from millennials that currently work in the financial industry:

Insights

What I found was pretty astonishing, and I was able to identify millennial creative pain point themes that span across the personal finance journey.

Student Loans constrict investing activities:

• Saving for retirement is undermined by outstanding student debt.
• Focus on paying off student debt, delays financial education

Prioritize work and social life over financial education

• Both non-financial and financial professionals are “too busy” to learn how to invest properly
• Millennials are unrealistically optimistic. They underestimate the risk of not developing a long-term strategy and believe they’ll eventually figure it out

Low-risk profile and financial illiteracy distorts the perceived value of investing

• Non-financial professionals are not “hooked” by the same value props as financial professionals
• Creatives have lower risk profiles than non-creatives.
• The channel in which people invest influences their behavior and risk profile

Victims of biased advice from personal networks

• People’s investment decisions and platform use are often influenced by their personal networks.
• Financial professionals have access to “better advice’ than non-financial professionals.

Engage in the market without a long-term strategy

• It has never been easier to start investing but zero-fee brokerages, like Robinhood, propagate a “day trading mentality”, which is a loser’s game.

Non-Financial Millennial Professional Persona

After synthesizing my insights, what I ended up with is a persona that has a higher % chance of making poor financial decisions.

What really surprised me, was that after analyzing the investing landscape, a myriad of solutions already exists for this persona.

No matter your current level of wealth, there is a robo-advsior, brokerage, or savings tool to help millennials start and automate a long-term passive investing strategy with very little knowledge of how the stock market works.

5 Whys: Trying to Find an Opportunity Space

Needless to say, after my research I was a little perplexed. Hypothetically, if the right solution already exists, that means there is a higher-order problem in the way Millennials behave in the stock market or choose not to participate out of ignorance.

To dig into this conundrum, I ran through a 5 whys exercise:

I then reframed my insights from the 5 why exercise as potential opportunity spaces:

Ideation + 3 Concepts

To “Ideate”, I created concept cards and ran through a self-direction ideation session on Miro which produced the following 3 concepts.

As of right now, I’m not really set on any of these, but I think the opportunity lies in the education/choice-architecture space prior to engaging with a financial product.