Financial wellness initiatives are everywhere, but some brands are achieving more than others.

Financial services brands in Australia and New Zealand continue to move with purpose to support customers’ financial wellbeing. It’s hard to find a brand that isn’t advancing some form of financial wellness initiative, whether in banking, general insurance, superannuation or wealth management.

Yes, a cost-of-living crisis has brought the concept of financial wellness further to the forefront for consumers and brands. But financial wellness goes beyond hardship support and responsive customer service; it’s now linked to so many aspects of a positive customer experience.

Today, financial wellness can encompass any initiative that supports customer goals. In practice, this could be protecting data, increasing education or prompting better financial habits. It can manifest differently depending on your segment – for example, supporting better budgeting for banks or retirement planning for super funds.

Speaking at a recent Adobe Financial Services Connect event, Australian Retirement Trust’s Chief Member Experience Officer, Simonne Burnett, said financial wellness is about customers having the confidence that they have enough money to live the life they want now and into the future.

CommBank’s General Manager of Customer Engagement, Matthew Malady, told event attendees that financial wellness centres on recognising and supporting good financial behaviours, not just rewarding customers for having certain products or shopping habits.

However, as these initiatives become more ubiquitous and entrenched as a customer expectation, simply having a wellness-labelled program no longer sets a brand apart. Adobe’s new report, A blueprint for delivering personalised financial wellness in Australia and New Zealand, explored consumer feedback on their digital banking and insurance experiences, revealing valuable insights into wellness programs.

A glimpse of the financial wellness scorecard.

To better understand how customers respond to financial wellness programs, Adobe conducted user testing across six major brands in banking and insurance. This provides a benchmark and overview of broader sector performance.

The user testing covered 13 metrics that span key aspects of the customer journey on desktop and mobile devices. Overall, it revealed a relatively high score at an aggregate level of 78 out of 100. However, looking more closely, we see variations across customer journey stages.

Users’ view of brand identity and first impressions scored highest, reaching up to 90 out of 100 for desktop. This reflects the significant ongoing investment of major financial services organisations in digital brand equity and presence.

At the other end of the spectrum, loyalty and retention received the lowest scores – particularly for the mobile app experience, which scored 71 out of 100. This may be because brands are prioritising functional app features, whereas consumer research shows that most people value a range of capabilities.

These include features linked to financial wellness. For instance, 72% of consumers use or want to use personalised financial insights and 58% want financial goal assessment.

The financial wellness measure was part of the broader Retain category within our customer experience testing, with scores ranging from 76 to 84 – a relatively high rating. Yet the narrow range suggests there is little to differentiate the performance of one initiative from the next.

This offers brands an opportunity to take their financial wellness programs to the next level. After all, effective initiatives reflect how well a brand knows its customers and can serve them as individuals, which is an important yardstick for personalised customer experience delivery.

Financial wellness must be end-to-end.

So, how do financial services firms integrate financial wellness into their customer journeys to drive loyalty and lifetime value? It starts with meeting consumer expectations in three areas.

First, customers are asking financial services brands to ‘know me’. That is, to understand their specific circumstances rather than offer a generic experience. Achieving this requires connected data to gain insights into customer preferences and signals that inform real-time communications.

For example, CommBank’s Matt Malady discussed the bank’s investment in its personalised customer recognition program, CommBank Yello. When navigating offers and rewards in the CommBank app, customers receive a tailored experience from the moment they log in, including an easy search function, personalised tiles and recommendations based on spending behaviour.

Malady noted that if customers are left to choose their own adventure, they often struggle to find what they’re looking for and become frustrated with the experience. “When you open the app in the first place, you should see a set of things that either are reflective of your previous activity or activity that may be useful to you,” he said.

The second is ‘show me’ – a desire for brands to lead the way in supporting customers’ financial wellness goals. This is where delivering relevant content becomes vital, and where AI can help streamline production workflows to achieve greater scale and speed.

Simonne Burnett shared how Australian Retirement Trust is redesigning and prioritising app features, emphasising that it doesn’t need to be complex to make a meaningful impact. “Our app used to have a circle with your [super] balance in the middle of it, but we’re getting feedback from people saying they want to see their balance grow over time. So, this is super simple, but [now] the first view when people open the app is year-on-year growth in their balances over time,” she said.

The third area is ‘help me’ – providing an on-ramp for further support at any customer journey stage. This is about making it easier to take action, including engaging with, or purchasing, products and services that are well suited to the customer’s needs and circumstances.

Adobe’s consumer research and conversations with financial services brands confirm there are significant opportunities to uplift customer experiences in all three areas. This is where financial wellness stops being a standalone initiative and becomes part of a holistic, integrated approach to supporting customer goals. Done well, it has the potential to enhance lifetime value for customers and brands.

To learn more, read A blueprint for delivering personalised financial wellness in Australia and New Zealand.

As Adobe’s Principle Digital Strategist, John Mackenney advises the senior leadership at Adobe’s enterprise customers on strategies for customer experience transformation and digital innovation. John brings together a wealth of knowledge in industry development and practical implementation experience to help customers devise comprehensive transformation programs.