Blog Competition on Suitable Finance for Agricultural Households
By Dhivya S, IFMR Rural Finance
For an institution focussed on delivering high-quality and customised financial services to low-income households, the Wealth Management approach has been the one of the key underlying layers that is core to the KGFS Model. The sole objective of the approach is to maximise the financial well-being of households by offering tailor-made and suitable recommendations to them. Financial well-being, in this case, is to help customer households achieve financial goals, as per their priorities, in a secured and sustainable manner.
We have always believed that this approach of understanding the inherent composition and risks of rural households to help create their financial road-map requires a deep level of expertise. This approach of wealth management proves to be very different from the traditional approach of providing a full suite of products to customers and ask them to choose based on their financial needs. In this context, IFMR Rural Finance (IRF) first designed a Financial Well-being Report (FWR) five years ago to meaningfully engage with the bottom of the pyramid clientele.
The FWR is an automated customer-centric financial planning tool that uses customer data and back-end algorithms to make specific and actionable financial recommendations to enrolled rural households. The concept of devising wealth management conversations with customers takes us to the basic premise that there is a customer touch point that is primarily driven by the front-end staff called Wealth Managers. Wealth Managers across all KGFS branches rely on the FWR report as a guide to provide suitable financial advice aimed at enabling customers to realize their financial goals. To better understand the household, comprehensive data collection process by way of enrolments is undertaken, capturing data on the household’s members, demographics, cash-flows and financial goals. Post on-boarding the customer, a complete cash-flow analysis and risk assessment of the household is done to determine the customer’s financial position. While the data collection process forms the building block; the crux of wealth management however rests with capturing the financial goals of households. This is a continuous process of engagement with the customers that gets refined with subsequent conversations and financial transactions at the KGFS.
FWR in its current version has evolved over the years through a process of continuous improvement. However, there are several substantial improvements that need to undergo in order to make it even more customer-centric. Through anecdotal experiences and client interactions, we realised that wealth management isn’t simply about making financial plans for one’s future but is a means of realising one’s priorities. It is in this process, we realised that the process of customer engagement needs to be improved across various components as a precursor to having quality wealth management conversations. These conversations with customer focus on helping them achieve their financial goals by identifying and prioritizing what is most important to them. This then becomes imperative for us to make the entire process simple, intuitive and easy for both the Wealth Managers as well as the customers to achieve its full potential.
This post explains the perspective on the approach, methodology and design of FWR 2.0 and seeks feedback on improving the tool.
In the latest version of the FWR 2.0, the report aims to build on the legacy of the earlier system and is intended to be a significant leap towards delving much deeper into the financial lives of households. FWR 2.0 is engineered with concepts of Human Centered Design (HCD) to offer more practical and actionable insights keeping the customer interests at its core. The key areas of development that we plan to include in its redesign are:
1) Strengthening the data collection process to ensure high quality inputs from customers to have an in-depth understanding of their financial lives – Data collection is a fundamental process whose quality in turn determines the quality of financial advice given to the customer. For instance, if the Wealth Managers at KGFS are unaware of the customers’ high social expenses or if they have borrowed through informal channels or they are just a few thousands short of cash to achieve their goal; the Wealth Managers would not be able to provide appropriate recommendations which may have an adverse effect on the household’s financial lifecycle.
The scope of FWR 2.0 seeks to bridge the lacunae created through the development of various prototypes of a smart tool and associated processes. The aim is to identify the best technique of asking questions to customers during enrolment in a way that they are able to relate the most. We also plan to design a data quality score to explicitly measure the quality of data captured. This would be one of the key constituents to make sure that the entire wealth management process is based on sound first-principles.
2) Process redesign for achieving customer goals – Greater emphasis would be laid upon the quality of engagement with customers to enable them to reflect on their financial situation, identify and prioritize their individual & household goals. Assuming the data collected is of good quality, there are other important factors impacting the conversation that are to be rethought of. Some of the immediate alterations thought of are related to articulation of goals and logistics of organising wealth management conversations – for instance, should we have these conversations at home or at the branch; should we use laptops or just record customer stories and so on.
3) Better customer connect and usability through intuitive services – In regards to redesigning inclusive and progressive wealth management process, the aim is also to enhance the interface for mobiles and tablets through responsive web design and effective visualisation. The revamp would entail interface and visual improvements that are intuitive enough for the Wealth Managers to have meaningful conversations with customers.
We plan to finalise the above stated areas by creating various contending prototypes that aim to fulfil the stated objectives of FWR 2.0. These sets of prototypes would be tested in KGFS branches with existing and potential customers. The revamp would entail conceptual, process and system related modifications that would be intuitive enough for both the staff and customers to equally participate in wealth management conversations. We are also scoping through the feasibility of creating a customer version of Financial Well-being Report that can be offered to the customer at the end of every conversation.
FWR 2.0 would not only aid in augmenting KGFS business performance and minimising business related risks due to improper or erroneous recommendation, but most importantly, would lead to an even more improved and meaningful customer engagement and retention.
