The Challenge

Founded in 1831 as Scottish Equitable, Aegon has been a provider of Insurance and savings products for nearly two centuries. But in all this time, they were sold to other businesses in the form of workplace pensions and investments. Then, in 2013, Aegon MD David Macmillan hired UX agency Fluent Interaction and proposition design consultancy Market Gravity to explore ways to sell pensions directly to consumers.

This was borne out of a crisis revealed in data. Far too few people were saving and had no idea how paltry a state pension would be. David was evangelical that we needed to reach people directly in order to address the problem.

We used three words in the organisation to communicate this. The first was simplicity. When you put a pensions and investment company on a mobile device, you have to simplify everything to within an inch of its life. 

With Retiready, we moved from having 8,000 funds to five. Our compliance documentation went from 66 pages to something you can scroll through on your mobile device with one flick.

David Macmillan

This one word, “simplicity” both became a mantra, and as the project unfolded, an unexpected point of contention as the date of launch approached.

The Approach

Overall outline

• Discover - 5 weeks

• Design - 6 weeks

• Deliver 6 x 6 week sprints

Stakeholders

• 30 Aegon Experts & Product Owners

• 6 Consultants from Fluent Interaction

• 6 Consultants from Market Gravity

• 1x External Branding Agency

• ∞ Consultants from Deloitte Digital

The engagement began with a deep dive into the psychology of how people think about and plan for the future, and based on this we devised a number of methods on how to shock them into taking action. Early research showed that simply showing the number of paydays they have ‘till retirement or giving them a readiness score greatly focussed the user’s attention.

With regular testing to inform us, we developed a set of features to stress-test retirement plans, and provide AI-based advice on how to optimise savings. Once we’d developed what we saw as a key set of principles to motivate user behaviour, we worked with Aegon product experts and Deloitte business analysts and developers to prototype out the full experience, testing new pages and features on a biweekly basis.

The main design challenge was to visualise or predict how much money the user would have on retirement, as there were so many factors - from market undulations to regulation - that made a prediction of precise figures impossible. This, combined with all of the desk research we read around how people think about themselves in the future, led to some speculative design we did on the side.

However the greater challenge was not related to design, but people; navigating and orchestrating the complex political environment and competing agendas of the various consultants, agencies and internal departments to ensure a good product made it to market unscathed. A key problem was that the development team had a wholly different interpretation of David Macmillan’s guiding principle of “simplicity”, which did not mean simple for people to use, but simple for them to build. So the technical implementation pushed the “viable” of MVP to its limit.

Likewise, branding was undertaken by an agency know for print work, and the marketing department went rogue, hiring Tennis’ John McEnroe for a series of strange and costly adverts. (Aegon sponsored Wimbledon, but Retiready was its own brand outside of this association).

The Outcome

Despite these various challenges, the product was successfully launched in late 2014, winning multiple industry awards, including the Corporate Entrepreneur Award. While it did not achieve the mass success that it aspired to, it did shake up the market and caught the attention of competitors. It also helped reshape and refocus Aegon internally and shifted thinking towards design and user focussed mindset.