Case study

Barclaycard MyMoneySteps

Meeting Barclaycard's and The Money Advice Trust's ultimate objective of developing a new online solution delivering personalised debt advice / action plans to tens of thousands of UK consumers; enabling them to manage their way out of debt without any human intervention

MyMoneySteps explained

Please take a few moments to watch the video below, it's narrated by the BBC's Liz Barclay and accompanied the MyMoneySteps launch in Parliament:

The problem

Designing and building an online solution to deliver bespoke financial advice to consumers in debt had never been attempted before. So, we set about considering an innovative approach to solving this problem, which became MyMoneySteps. Questionnaire data and usage information retrieved from the solution would later be made available to Government and and other professional and charitable bodies to help drive policy and debt awareness.

The approach

We conceived of a solution that would utilise support for Questions, Rules, Suggestions and Calculations within our CMS (AbsolutelyInteractive) that would create a detailed situational analysis of the user and automatically trigger real-time advice via the solution and personalised reminders by email. Since the solution encourages users to update their situation regularly over several months, it continuously refines its advice; thus allowing the user to actually create an ongoing plan to work their way out of debt. The level of detail and accuracy of the advice provided is paramount when dealing with a user’s finances and subsequently, the system continuously executes over 250 rules and around 200 calculations for every one of tens of thousands of users to generate its recommendations.

The outcome

Launched in Parliament, the solution has now been operating for a number of years with many tens of thousands of consumers benefiting. S-Digital, working closely with MAT and Barclaycard continued to develop and support the solution until very recently when its natural longevity as a platform was reached. In total, the solution captured over 6.5Gb of insightful data relating to the debt situation in the UK and has received a number of accolades and awards from several major panels.

MyMoneySteps (MMS)

Personal, articulate, prioritised and expert advice

MyMoneySteps utilises complex branching within personalised questionnaires (over 250 questions) to gather full information about the user's financial, emotional and family situation. As users return to MMS they can update any aspect of their financial situation to keep their financial status up to date.

Over 200 financial calculations are executing in the background in reponse to the users' answers, enabling the triggering of any of 450 advice actions.

Thus, as users come back to MMS repeatedly (often over months) and they action their personalised debt plan (see an example to the left), they will be in a position to work their way out of debt or generate personalised financial statements that can be used to negotiate with debtors.

Seems to good to be true? Well it was a lot of work and a comprehensive budget but over 60,000 users would now endorse the solution!

Security, Integration

Security

The system was reviewed by Barclaycard's own Security Department, to ensure compliance with the PCI standard (the same rating as their own online banking at the time):

Further Integration

Turn 2 Us data flow technologies

Later development of MMS included working with Turn2Us to dynamically and securely populate user financial data from their system allowing access to MMS through a single sign-on, thus pre-populating many of MMS' 250 questions.

Custom Reporting Solution

Later in 2016-2017 we developed a comprehensive reporting system for MyMoneySteps.

This enabled staff at The Money Advice Trust to create, generate and save bespoke reports based on any combination of answers to the 250 questions managed within MMS, i.e. query criteria such as:

Families with 2 or more children
Renting a 2 bed-property property
Residing in Scotland
With less than £200 disposable income per month
Receiving specific benefits
That do have a bank account
Where the father has been unemployed for more 12 months
Where the family has accrued debts over £2000 during the last 2 years

Over 60,000 users' data (in excess of 6,500Mb of information) became readily available to generate reports for Central Government and other professional and charitable bodies to assist in policy making and debt awareness in the UK.

More solutions for non-profit organisations

“I have worked with S-Digital on two projects over the last year, My Money Steps and Horizons. During both projects they have demonstrated a good project management approach, setting clear milestones and dates for project deliverables. They manage their own resources well to deliver against timelines and are often ahead of time on items. They also proactively manage other deliverables through emails and phone calls. They are flexible in their approach and clear where additional requirements come to light about impacts on timelines and costs. I have genuinely felt on both projects that S-digital have been a very committed partner in the project rather than a supplier of it.”

Andrea Hughes, Senior Community Manager, Corporate Affairs
Barclaycard

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