FinWise

Smart Financial Advisor

AI-Driven Financial Advisor app that assists users in the preliminary stages by gathering and analyzing their financial information, goals, and preferences.

Define

Business Need Statement

In the financial advisory industry, human advisors face significant challenges in providing timely and personalized advice to all clients due to their limited capacity to handle numerous clients simultaneously. The initial steps of meeting clients, understanding their financial situations, goals, resources, and plans, are time-consuming and labor-intensive. This often leads to inefficient allocation of human resources, with advisors spending considerable time on initial consultations that could be streamlined.

Let’s turn the business problem to human-centered problem with 5 whys:

Intent

To address the business need for informed decision-making, personalized advice, and stronger customer relationships, the defined objective is to Recommend with Confidence.

Define The Intent

Data

We conducted several workshops to analyze data through three lenses: public, private, and user data. We then categorized the data based on priority: what we have, what we want, and what would be nice to have. Below is a segment of the data categorization resulting from our brainstorming sessions:

Internal financial metrics and other data types are crucial for the AI-driven Financial Advisor app, providing insights into essential, desirable, and supplementary data requirements. These insights help optimize the user experience and enhance the effectiveness of financial recommendations.

Reasoning:

Understand

Businesses can provide tailored investment strategies by leveraging their role as Smart Financial Advisor, utilizing insights derived from user spending patterns, income and earnings, and financial goals and milestones.

These tertiary effects highlight potential risks that could affect the AI-driven financial advisor’s business operations and reputation.

User Research

To explore the financial advising domain, we divided our user interviews into two groups: financial advisors and experts, and potential users seeking advice in these areas.

In our interviews with financial experts, we engaged with various professionals to identify where they see opportunities to leverage AI and areas where integrating this technology could enhance user experiences.

  • Personalized Advice:

Advisors stress the need for the AI to tailor financial advice based on individual client data.

  • Efficient Query Handling:

The AI should manage common financial queries, freeing advisors to focus on complex issues.

  • Advanced Data Analysis:

The AI needs strong data analysis capabilities to provide insightful financial scenarios for clients.

Based on the tertiary effects identified earlier, the primary concern is data privacy. We conducted interviews with users to understand their hesitations about sharing their data with AI and to explore solutions to address these concerns.

Here are some of the concerns and pain points we discovered through these interviews:

  • Data Privacy Concerns:

    • Users are highly concerned about the privacy of their financial data and how it is protected from unauthorized access.

  • Control Over Data Access:

    • Users want clear control over which parts of their financial data are shared with the AI and which are kept private.

  • Transparency in Data Use:

    • There is a demand for transparency about how their data is used, including how recommendations are generated and how long data is retained.

  • Secure Data Transmission:

    • Users are worried about the security of data transmission between their devices and the AI system. They expect encrypted communication channels.

  • Data Ownership Clarity:

    • Users want to know who owns their data and what rights they have regarding data deletion or modification.

  • Regular Security Audits:

    • Users prefer regular security audits and updates to ensure that the AI system remains secure against evolving threats.

  • User Control Over Data Sharing:

    • Users seek the ability to manage and adjust permissions for data sharing, including opting out of certain data collection practices.

Journey Design

Based on user insights and the data collected by our teams, we developed a comprehensive roadmap and crafted detailed user journeys for each step of the process. Here is an example of the financial advising and security flow: