Truist

Service Design Hackathon

Timeline

6 weeks

Team

Erica Nieves ( Me ^_^ )
Caitlin Dalton
Nataly Barona Lozano

Tools

Figma
FigJam
Google Drive
Zoom

Project Background

Truist Financial has been working for years to provide financial literacy to customers as they promote long-term habits with money that will benefit their customers and their families. Truist Financial branding and voice speaks to helping people grow and they are always looking for innovative ways to do that. The bank has also realized there are a lot of parents finding different ways to educate their children on financial responsibilities and is seeing the need grow more and more each month.

Truist

Truist Financial Corporation is an American bank holding company headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina. The company was formed in December 2019 as the result of the merger of BB&T (Branch Banking and Trust Company) and SunTrust Banks. Its bank operates 2,781 branches in 15 states and Washington, D.C., and offers consumer and commercial banking, securities brokerage, asset management, mortgage, and insurance products and services.

The Problem

Truist Financial has prioritized educating customers and promoting effective money management practices, benefiting both individuals and their families. They not only emphasize personal growth but also respond to the increasing demand from parents for innovative ways to teach financial responsibilities to their children.

Research

  • I focused on doing a business analysis to really understand what the business values are. See what Truist already has in place when it comes to financial education specifically towards minors. Key findings were : 

    • Community

      • Strive to partner with people and organizations

      • Work to developing programs

    • Care

      • Focus on accessible banking

      • Want to level the playing field

      • Partnered with Operation HOPE

  • Another area of focus was to see what Truist already has in place when it comes to financial education specifically towards minors. What I discovered was that Truist didn’t have much in place to help minors learn how to value and use money. The only thing they had in place was a college estimator calculator. 

  • Together with my team we also did some general research on when and how children should learn financial responsibility. Key findings were : 

    • Start early

    • Teach through experience 

    • Encourage independent decision making 

    • Games and simulations work well

    • Don’t micromanage

Goal

Now with our research findings in place we had to decide what we wanted to focus on for our service design. We wanted to create a service design for a new feature since Truist didn’t quite have a feature to teach minors about financial literacy and we wanted it to be something that the parent and child could do together that way the parent could guide the child along through whatever activity we decided on.

Ideation

What we ended up with was an app that contained lessons that the parent and child would take together and by completing lessons the child would earn rewards. With our feature in place we went on to just create a list of customer, front-end, back-end, and support actions that we thought would be needed in order for this service to be viable.

With our list in place I got to work on turning our bullet points into a blueprint and from there creating a couple of iterations after discussing with my teammates.

Final Iteration

For the final design we updated the wording so it was more succinct and cleaned it up to make it easier to follow.

Reflection

Closing Thoughts

This hackathon was something that was thrown at me without any previous experience and I really want to thank my teammates for going through this project with me. All of us were inexperienced in this field but we really came together to tackle this project head on. This project taught me how to think not just about the product that is being created but all the outside resources that are needed for people to use the product smoothly and effectively.

Future Steps

Research gamification to make the feature fun and interactive

Conduct user interviews

Collaborate with schools to connect with the community as well as provide resources for those in need