Meet the Choicemakers

Standard Life Choices is on a mission to create the future of life savings. We’ll start by showing you some of the things we’re trying out to help people be better with their money. Throughout this process we want to be as open as possible and update as we go along. Here, we are talking about how we created characters to let us talk about life savings in a slightly different way.

Money is a funny thing isn’t it? It’s something we all, hopefully, have. It’s something that we spend 90% of our waking lives trying to earn. Having it can make you appear to have some degree of power or authority. And if you have a lot of it people like to put you on a list, like the ‘Top of the Pops’ but for money. However, one thing people don’t like doing is talking about money.

You can’t talk about money because it’s uncouth or not the done thing. But how do you learn about money if no one speaks about it?

That’s why with Choices we are trying some stuff out to consider how a ‘money product’ talks to you.

Choices is a smart product in the sense that it does things for you without you having to think. This isn’t something new; what is new is how we find opportunities to save money and then put it in the right places for you.

To do this we currently have these utensils to our life savings Swiss Army Knife;

Tracker

The one that keeps an eye on your bank account for extra money or spikes in income we could make work harder elsewhere.

Buffer

The one that helps you get your money to a better place. He always is on hand to show how investing the money Tracker finds into Standard Life products could help you reach your priorities.

Guider

The one that takes the work out of building your retirement by going on missions that get your money and your plans to a better place.

For each tool there’s a Choicemaker — one of our gang of smart money characters. You might notice they all look like they are going on an expedition, well they are, because they are pathfinders for your money. More will be created, and some may not be around forever. We will capture all these changes for you here at Choices’ Campfire.

Do you have a suggestion for a Choicemaker? Follow the progress here on Medium or get in touch by emailing Simon_Lyle@standardlife.com. Sign up to early access here