ČSOB / In partnership with Visa

Elder people go cashless

Our Expertise

Business Strategy

Customer Insights

Proposition Design

We’ve helped the senior clients of ČSOB, one of the biggest Czech banks to simplify their lives by using their bank cards regularly

Challenge

People, whose most productive years were 20-30 years ago, have a different attitude toward money and the use of modern payment tools than millennials and Gen-Z do. Sometimes older people are too shy or careful to give in to modern technologies since they are not very familiar with them.

ČSOB in Czech Republic wanted to change this situation and help their silver clients to learn to use their cards for payments on a regular basis. Not just to simplify their lives but also to show them that modern banking tools are not a youngsters’ game.

The bank has tried different approaches, campaigns and motivations, but none of them has shown much success. So they’ve asked us to help them crack this problem.

Our main challenge was clear — change the behaviour of seniors and incorporate card payments into their everyday life, create a habit of it. Which is rather difficult since there are no relevant use cases for elderly people.

Our approach

We always say: “If you want to design something meaningful for the people, you must talk to them first.” So for the first step we’ve invited a couple of grandparents for an interview. We wanted to learn more about how they live, the way they shop, and what they value most. These talks have brought us many interesting insights and defined the barriers that make using bank cards more difficult for the elderly.

To find out how common these barriers are, we’ve conducted a survey that gave us a detailed view of the scale of this problem. Upon the conclusion of the survey, we were ready to prepare a strategy and value propositions for our target customers

Then, in a series of creative workshops and design sprints with the client, we’ve developed a strategy on how to approach older customers and motivate them to use a payment card instead of cash. Based on that, we’ve created 6 different proposals, targeting different groups of customers. Together with the client, we’ve selected two of them to start with.

At Visa, we help companies and, of course, customers to benefit from the full potential of digitalization and move from cash to cashless payments by providing a wide range of digital tools and data-based insights that are core of our business. Analyzing billions of payments every day, we clearly understand the power of habit, especially if it’s grounded in you through your entire life. To be able to change it we not only need to know where and how people pay, but we most importantly need to understand why they do so, what motivates them, what scares them? Hence we joined forces with the B&T lab because they know how to augment our data with behavioural point of view. Insights that they’ve crafted during their research allowed us to understand how the older generation sees banking and payments in particular. Using the insights they’ve created a strategy and designed an execution helping to payment habits of older customers. Results were impressive and the bank was extremely happy, considering the specificity of the target customer group.

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Hana Wasserburger

Head of VCA, Visa

Solution

We’ve decided to make the first contact with a payment card as simple as possible, and re-design the onboarding process in a way that will help the customers understand how the card works and let them create a habit of using it.

Then we redefined the customer journey and created communication and educational materials that set customers’ expectations while they are waiting for a new card.

We’ve also designed a new welcome package that the card comes in. It introduces the card and its benefits but also guides the customer through the first and most important steps – activation and first several purchases with the card.

In the materials, we addressed all the fears and mind barriers around cards that the customers might have, and what was also very important, we’ve used clear “non-bank” wording and a very human approach, that made people more comfortable. We didn’t want them to change their normal behaviour and make them use the card, but rather to gently incorporate it into their everyday life.

Impact

Although the entire activity was planned for several months, even the results of the first wave were amazing and kept getting better with every next wave.

Data showed that nearly 75% of the target customers activated their new cards and started to use them on a regular basis.