Redesign That: Online Personal Finance (Part 7)

By guest authors Charles W. Bush and Kathy Hwang of 3Strand Innovation, a brand experience consultancy.

Over these past few weeks, we’ve taken a quick look at:
(1) the core value proposition behind money management
(2) a market landscape analysis of online personal finance services, and
(3) opportunities to improve the user experience and engage users in social networking (using Wesabe.com as our candidate for redesign).

Some of the most interesting findings have been in exploring the vast potential behind connecting your financial activity with an interactive community. We focused many of our design concepts on relationship-centered aspects of money management, resulting in new ideas like group challenges, budget buddies, guilty pleasures and comparative goals. This approach opens up several opportunities to engage users in a new way and possibly pave untapped paths for future revenue streams.

Looking at Wesabe’s business model, so far they have stayed away from using advertising or leveraging demographic data. According to Wesabe’s CEO, Marc Hedlund, the company plans to continue offering basic services free, and start introducing premium services, designed to add value in exchange for a subscription fee. In a recent interview, Hedlund said, “The challenge, of course, is that many banks provide those services for free. But we have some ideas on how to make this experience that much better at Wesabe to make a low fee appealing enough to users that want it.” [1]

This is a fascinating challenge, considering that if you want to build a business model off add-on services during a down economy, you really have to understand what makes your customers tick. It comes down to the strength of your core value proposition and how well you can deliver your customer experience.

In tough economic times, we need to look beyond just cutting costs and ask ourselves: What kinds of experiences would this young generation of users be willing to pay for during a time when they are facing the biggest economic challenge of their lives? What kinds of needs will they gravitate towards? How can you best address those needs and make it economically sustainable?

[1] Source: Article from Ars Technica

This segment is part 7 in the series : Redesign That: Online Personal Finance
1 2 3 4 5 6 7