What does your picture-perfect future look like?
Have you ever wondered how your silver years will look like? Do you see yourself sipping on cocktails on a cruise, enjoying a spa with your friends, or blissfully enjoying time with your grandkids at home?
Conversations around retirement may be a source of dread for many, particularly the young who may be less than eager to broach this topic prematurely. To dispel the notion that retirement planning is burdensome, DBS recently launched Face Your Future in Hong Kong. It is a first-of-its-kind digital engagement experience that encourages more people to envision their ideal retirement lifestyle and how they can work towards it.
We caught up with Yvonne Chia and June Chu from the DBS Consumer Banking Bancassurance team, who are leading the Face Your Future project in Hong Kong. They share more about the inspiration behind Face Your Future and the innovation journey with DBS Startup Xchange.
Can you share with us the motivation behind Face Your Future?
Yvonne: Sure! The genesis of Face Your Future was based on one simple human insight — people hesitate to plan for scenarios and things they cannot see.
Using facial recognition and artificial intelligence, Face Your Future is able to engage users in a fun and interactive way by turning their selfies into their retirement portraits — along with their estimated monthly retirement expense for a complete picture of how their retirement life looks like. We hope this visualisation will jolt users into planning for their retirement.
That’s a really interesting way to get people to think about retirement! And how is Face Your Future different from other retirement-related content out there?
Yvonne: We found that most retirement-related content includes a degree of scare tactics. They often call attention to the urgency of planning for retirement and exaggerate the financial amount and effort needed.
With Face Your Future, we are looking to form authentic connections and engage with users meaningfully. We avoided using intimidation as a motivation to “scare” users into action. Instead, we lay the realities of retirement in an easy-to-understand and engaging way so that users will be motivated to find out more out of curiosity.
Furthermore, we share bite-sized information and practical takeaways with users that they can feasibly act on. Doing so allows users to relate to the information a lot better. They won’t go away feeling overwhelmed or have the misconception that they need an unrealistic amount of money for retirement planning.
We understand that Hong Kong is the first market to adopt Face Your Future — can you share with us the process and your experience for adapting and positioning this experience locally?
June: After getting the brief for the initiative, we started working on some preliminary research into the Hong Kong market and found that retirement calculators were already available in the market. However, the existing ones in the market lacked the element of engagement and fun. This led us to develop Face Your Future. Using gamification tactics, Face Your Future aims to attract users’ curiosity and enhance their understanding towards the importance of retirement planning.
To better resonate with the Hong Kong market, we have incorporated local Hong Kong culture, visuals and even slang in Face Your Future. For example, the Hong Kong city skyline was used, and the questions posed in Face Your Future also relate to Hong Kong people’s daily life — one of the questions ask users what dim sum restaurant they would like to frequent after retirement. We believe that featuring local elements help to make the app more relevant and favoured by audiences.
That’s really cool! What were some challenges faced in the initial ideation and innovation process and how did the team overcome them?
June: Hong Kong’s insurance market is mature. There are a wide range of insurers to choose from, each providing tailored retirement products catered to various customer needs. Therefore, to differentiate ourselves within this market, we would have to try to find a new way to promote the product as well as to stand out from the crowd.
Yvonne: In the beginning, we were cognisant that people may hesitate to take their selfie and share with us. But we took extra care to assure users that we will not use their photos for other purposes, coupled with the promise of a fun and meaningful experience.
June: We also saw a lack of awareness on retirement needs among the young generation and strong competitor landscape. The younger generation do not realise the critical reality of retirement and the importance of starting retirement planning as early as possible. In Hong Kong, life expectancy could hit 90 years by 2045 and people may be spending up to 30 years in retirement. The average Hong Kong person would require at least HK$5.11M in savings to realise their desired retirement lifestyle. These circumstantial realities are not immediately realised by the young generation as they think it is still a distant future away from them. find a new way to promote the product as well as to stand out from the crowd.
What’s a challenge you face when it comes to pushing innovation in your daily work, and how do you overcome it?
Yvonne: We are often saddled with many important issues to consider before taking any innovative projects on board. Some concerns include budget, synergies with current platforms and systems, as well as cyber security.
We overcome these challenges by starting small — test your concept in a bite-sized POC first. If you can demonstrate success with a POC, others may come on board to support a full business roll-out.
This project was brought to life with start-up Trinax through the Startup Xchange programme. How was that experience for you?
Yvonne: We absolutely loved bringing this project to life with the Startup Xchange team from DBS Innovation. They showed robust project management and tech discipline and were strongly aligned with us on business and customer experience objectives. The strong partnership helped guide us in our thinking and how we managed the project with our start-up partner Trinax.
Likewise, Trinax has been a great partner on this innovation journey. They exhibit strong creative thinking and technical expertise of a big tech vendor. They were also able to engage us with agility and flexibility that you typically find in smaller boutique set-ups.
What the results are like so far and what can we look forward to for Face Your Future?
June: For Hong Kong, we are so thrilled to see that Face Your Future received media attention even with a limited budget. Within a week of the launch, more than 1,300 unique visitors visited the page and appointments have been scheduled. We plan to conduct user feedback so as to enhance the customer journey and drive further improvements to ensure greater success going forward.
Yvonne: Since we have launched Face Your Future in Hong Kong in June, we’re also planning for launches in Singapore and Indonesia soon. Come 2021, we hope to see this rolling out in more markets!
Face Your Future is a first-of-its-kind innovative experience to raise awareness of the importance of retirement planning. It leverages facial recognition and artificial intelligence technologies to instantly help users visualise their retirement future. Face Your Future’s personalised approach includes a proprietary algorithm that estimates users’ retirement cost based on their choice of retirement lifestyle. The first-of-its-kind Face Your Future can be experienced at https://go.dbs.com/hk-fyf.
Face Your Future was developed in collaboration with start-up Trinax through DBS Startup Xchange, a fintech programme run by the DBS Innovation team designed to foster partnerships with fintech start-ups to co-create real solutions and bring emerging technologies to the bank.
