Navigating ESG Challenges in Financial Services

Challenge

As one of the UK’s leading provider of pensions and investment funds, our client was facing 3 challenges:

1. To respond to regulatory changes arising from the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) changes being adopted with Financial Services
2. To meet the needs of a wider investment audience that wanted to understand how to invest with a broader sense of responsibility; and
3. To implement the wider impacts of Sustainability within their organisation and their connected parties including the adviser network.

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Approach & Concepts

We adopted a Service Design approach to first uncover the needs of investors and advisers, before moving into ideation and designing a new future experience to address sustainability themes.

A key to our approach was early use of prototypes - concepts to provoke thought from the investors and advisers, prior to moving onto more comprehensive prototypes.

A second key element was developing the behavioural models of what needed to change - specifically how to introduce the parameter of ‘Responsibility’ alongside the historical investing decision making parameters of Risk and Return. Our 3R model approach set out how the communication of this new mental model could be undertaken for different investors and advisers, according to their behavioural archetypes.

The key outputs were a series of new initiatives to better communicate sustainability throughout the wider ecosystem of internal terms, advisers and investors. This was represented in a series of 8 different clickable prototypes, that brought the innovations to life.

These new initiatives were provided with high fidelity prototypes, supported with evidence of testing with individual users and focus groups.  This was supported with a business case analysis and roadmap prioritising activities over the next 5 year time frame.

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