Fintech Insider Podcast by 11:FS
00:13:20 · Sarah Kocianski, Kate Moody
[00:13:20] S4: well because it would make your job so much easier if people were more willing to talk to you about their money? [00:13:25] S2: Well, I mean, I've got quite chubby cheeks, so I tend to find that those help to break down people's anxieties. But yeah, I mean, think it's something that probably is a solution for. I'm maybe just not smart enough to have found it just yet. [00:13:40] S4: Well, I mean, I think potentially what do you think financial institutions could do? Like it doesn't have to be you who finds the answer. So what do you think financial institutions across the board could do to make subjects, you know, like certainly some of the more complex financial services products as well, more relevant and therefore easier for people to talk about, I suppose.
00:14:00 · Kate Moody
[00:14:00] S2: It feels to me like we've ended up in this sort of situation where people like there's so many parts of managing money, making financial decisions that are just objectively hard and difficult. And I think we've ended up in a scenario where people don't feel the vast majority of people don't feel like they can get help and support in an easy way. And so people have kind of got used to either just trying to work things out by themselves and failing and so quite often repressing or delaying a decision. And kind of when you've flipped to other industries, obviously we know that financial services is very unique, but you know, obviously there are lots of other heavily regulated industries where they have maybe overlapping issues. If you took the health industry, for example, like if you had a medical problem and you went to go, you'd go to see a doctor because you would believe you would understand and know that a doctor's job is to help you understand and solve that problem. And obviously we've got, we've had historically lots of financial guidance, but again, if I extended that metaphor, if I went to a doctor and all they gave me back was some guidance about how I could operate on myself, I probably wouldn't be enormously thrilled. So again, I think we need to, the industry probably needs to try and find ways which are obviously very difficult to move more towards a model where when people do have to make fundamentally difficult or complex decisions, there is somewhere where they can go to talk about something, to explain their situation and to receive help and support that is going to help them make a decision that is right for them. And obviously we've seen movements towards that, have the SDN UK kind of introducing childhood support, know, whether that goes far enough, I guess I'm sure isn't probably right for us to discuss in this podcast, but people across the industry acknowledge that there is a gap here. And I think if people had a sense that they could take the hard parts of money somewhere, maybe it would open up more of a conversation around it.
00:15:52 · Sarah Kocianski
[00:15:52] S4: Yeah, I mean Ross, there's obviously a cultural point here that Kate's touched on and I think perhaps the British are particularly bad at feeling comfortable about talking about their personal finances, whether that's what they earn, what they spend, etcetera. But do you think the financial services industry has contributed to that in some way on top of kind of the underlying Britishness of things?
00:16:13 · Ross Gallagher
[00:16:13] S5: Yeah, I do. I think there is inherent complexity. I think if I tie it back to sort of my wish, and actually I think it links neatly in with Kate's sort of hospital or sort of surgery comparison. I think again, what we do as an industry far too often is we talk about products and the complexities of the products rather than talking about specific customer outcomes and that the products are a tool or a mix of tools that sort of get you to an outcome. And I think, you know, yeah, I I agree that there's there's definitely cultural factors that play into this, but I think we all have a deep seated insecurity when it comes to dealing with things that we don't fully understand. I think we all bury our heads a little bit and procrastinate on the things that we can't quite figure out. And sure, we know that they're important, but actually, you know, when it comes to, oh gosh, I've got to sit down, I've got to figure this out by myself and oh my gosh, what if I'm wrong? I think that's intimidating. I it puts people off. So, I think when we're talking about the complexities of products, and I think if I go back to what I was saying on the previous section about particularly some of the more complex products around investment. I think some of the language, particularly some of the sort of small print language that we've always sort of positioned quite prominently when it's come to advertisements about things like investments, the value of your investment may go down as well as up. You could lose all of your investment, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, I think it's almost positioned them as much more speculative than they are, almost positioned them alongside things like gambling, things like crypto. I think we're backpedaling a little bit on that certainly in The UK. I think we recognize now that as part of a blend of financial products, I think investments are a very useful tool in terms of saving and building for your future. But I think likewise with pensions, as I say, I think we've just accepted this narrative that, oh, well, customers aren't really interested in pensions. They don't really understand them. So we'll just let them be this passive product in the background instead of actively trying to engage customers in the benefits.
00:18:29 · Ross Gallagher, Sarah Kocianski
To Benjamin's point, the benefits of investing in pensions very early on and how that compounds over the course of a career, etcetera, etcetera. So yeah, I think to your question, you know, how we go about stripping back some of that complexity and again tying it back to customer outcomes as an industry, I think there's probably a way to go. [00:18:50] S4: That makes sense. And and and to follow-up on that with you, Benjamin, perhaps, do you think there is something that needs to change about how financial services communicate information to their customers to help ease this problem, to help ease people's unwillingness or uncertainty around talking about money?
00:19:07 · Benjamin Ensor
[00:19:07] S6: Yeah, think the interesting thing here is I think what Kate's sort of driving at is people feel maybe uncomfortable talking about money to their friends and maybe even certain family members because there's this sort of sense of judgment because money is in some ways a metric for success or just as various other things in life are. And that maybe makes people feel uncomfortable. But the issue is being able to find someone else that you can talk to, being able to find a professional, being able to find that doctor. And I think financial advice has often been a bit unavailable for various reasons. And so you end up with this kind of one size fits all type solutions if anything. And so the real issue is how do you provide tailored, relevant sort of financial advice and guidance? And I think if you think about the world twenty years ago before social media, it was much, much harder to find any kind of financial advice guidance. Basically, there were some good money magazines and newspapers. Maybe it's thirty years ago. Right? Yeah. There's an awful lot of actually very, very good guidance available on social media. Unfortunately, there's also a lot of dross and a lot of people who are trying to give you bad advice that's in their interests. But I do think the industry can learn from, you know, some of the amazing content creators who are creating really good accessible content, you know, with visuals and words because some of these concepts, you know, know, Ross, you were just talking about sort of compound returns or leverage, and some of these concepts are a bit complex, particularly if maths wasn't really your thing at school. If you can visualize that for people and talk it through with them and give them someone they can trust to talk it through, think there's a huge opportunity. But it's difficult it is difficult to scale without AI.