New Approaches to Banking for the Older Old
Funded by the Research Councils UK, Digital Economy Programme
Commencing 1st May, 2010 for 18 months
For more information contact A.monk@psych.york.ac.uk or see the personal web pages of individual researchers listed at the end of this page under 'Research Partners'.
Summary
An eighty year old today is expected on average to live well beyond the year 2020. However the needs of the older old are seldom considered in relation to banking and financial services.
This project started with a qualitative study investigating the meaning of money to a group of people aged over 80. Participants were asked to tell their financial life stories. This focus on biography allowed them to relate rich narratives that indicated enduring values and concerns. The findings of this study fed in to the next phase of the research which involved a groups of people aged over eighty in the design of new banking products and technologies to support their practices.
In the second phase of the research products and services were co- designed, with other members of this age group. These illustrate how the payment systems and services provided by UK banks could be made much more inclusive. In addition to the over 80s, we can see how these results could also benefit the broader community.
We are now presenting the results of this work to the banking industry, policy makers and the design/HCI communities.
Progress - December 2010
Financial biographies were obtained from twelve 80 and 90 year olds. In addition in depth interviews were held with three carers and three experts on financial problems for the older old and the benefits system. We have also interviewed two individuals involved in financial services.
Themes that emerged from the things that our participants told us included:
- their daily practices with cash and the workarounds they have developed for existing systems;
- the role of locality in these practices;
- the need for control;
- the intimacy they have dealing with other people's finances and having others deal with theirs.
Download paper expanding on these themes and the methods used here
Progress - September 2011
The results of the study described above informed the content for a series of Participatory Design Workshops with eleven people aged between 80 and 87. Over a period of four months we met with these groups in four separate workshops.
These workshops used prompts such as 'design postcards'. These were A6-sized folded cards with an illustration, a sentence-length description of an idea, and some quotes from the biographies. Based on the things the workshop participants told us we also made demonstrations of how one might use fingerprint readers, digital pens, voice recorders and RFID cards to solve some of the problems they identified.
These were not demonstrated as solutions to the discussions in previous workshops but rather as prompts to invent new ideas based upon the problems, needs and desires of the participants. Much of our discussion revolved around alternatives to cheques as methods of payment.
Coming shortly: Download conference paper "The joy of cheques" here
Download 2-page paper describing progress to September 2011 here
Progress - October 2011
A large number of ideas for new services and technologies in the form of working prototypes and simulations were designed cooperatively with our participants in the Participatory Design Workshops. We selected 3 of them for presentation to the banking industry, policy makers and other interest parties. These demonstrations of services and technologies show how the payment systems and services provided by UK banks could be made more inclusive .
The need for cheque-like payments
The eighty and ninety year olds who worked with the researchers to develop these provocative ideas saw great value in cheques for certain kinds of payment. Many of them were meticulous record keepers and valued the paper record provided by the cheque book stub. They also valued the flexibility of being able to simply write the name of the payee on the cheque rather than getting a bank account. Most of all they valued the experience of writing a cheque, particularly for gifts and donations.
The pictures below are of devices developed with the eighty and ninety year olds to maintain the properties of cheques that they valued. A familiar paper cheque is used to initiate a purely electronic transaction. There is no reason why this transaction needs to be the responsibility of a bank and the eighty and ninety year olds suggested local organisations who might take this on. The researchers have gone on to make a working automated system capable of transferring money in to a Paypal account using Amazon Mechanical Turk.
Electronic pen and cheque book.
Here the AnotoR pen senses what you write and transmits the information to the payment system.
The need for other people to make financial transactions for you
For some of the eighty and ninety years olds who spoke to the researchers mobility problems and a lack of experience with modern bank accounts meant they received help from others in making financial transactions. Most commonly, would ask trusted third-parties such as family members or caregivers to withdraw money on their behalf. What is required is some mechanism for delegating small well defined financial tasks to another individual in a way that limits the risk of abuse of the necessary relationship of trust by either party.
In response to these issues, the researchers have explored how a ‘Guardian Angel' service provided by a bank could achieve this. This service would provide an account holder with an extra card that can be temporarily shared with others. A touch screen device is used to illustrate how the Guardian Angel card could be authorised for use by a helper, for example, to withdraw a specific amount of cash from a given ATM within a specified time limit. A formal analysis of the "workarounds" used by housebound people to get cash and shopping was used to develop the Guardian Angel service. This model is intended as a tool that could be used by any organisation wishing to support delegated payments.
The problem of PINs and passwords
One of the reasons why cash and cheques are preferred by many of the eighty and ninety years olds was that these systems did not require the use of PINs or passwords to access funds. Many of the people who worked with the researchers felt the need to write down the numbers the banks provided them with, hiding them in diaries and address books. Such a practice is frowned upon by the banks as it is unlikely to be secure. The secure PIN reminder below uses three personal identifiers (fingerprint, hand gestures and body sway).
This secure PIN reminder is intended as a provocation to the banking industry. It highlights the lengths to which people have to go to use a unusable system. Banking policy and the technologies implemented in payment systems have a long way to go before they can be judged as accessible to the full population of people that need to use them.
A secure PIN reminder
Download briefing paper "Accessible digital banking: The needs of eighty and ninety year olds" here
Further information about our project available here:
http://www.eightysomething.org/
Related work:
Age UK report, The Way We Pay, 2011
UK Payment Council report, 2011 National Payments Plan
Research Partners
Departments of Psychology and Computer Science Andrew Monk (Project PI), John Clark (CI), Paul Dunphy (RA, 4 months) |
SIDE, the Digital Economy Research Hub on Social Inclusion through the Digital Economy Patrick Olivier (PI), Feng Li (CI), Dan Jackson, |
University of Northumbria at Newcastle Mark Blythe (PI), John Vines (RA) |
|
Age UK, Yorkshire and Humber Region Lucy Malenczuk |
Barclays, Insights and Propositions Department Alex Alder (Head of Research) |
