According to the Center of Financial Innovation 2018 Survey, 81 percent of Americans experience significant stress related to finances, with 78 percent wanting help with personal financial management. With Generation X and Millennials poised to inherit $68 trillion over the next 30 years (as predicted by Business Insider), and nearly 76 percent of millennials lacking financial literacy, institutions have an opportunity to play a key role in improving consumers’ overall financial wellness.

Today’s consumers desire the ability to set a roadmap for establishing and meeting their personal financial goals. Having a solution such as a digital personal financial planner empowers users to create personalized goals and map out how best to achieve them.

A well-designed digital personal financial planner includes:

• Streamlined customer experience;
• An intuitive interface;
• Data prefill for existing customers;
• Progress “Save,” “Resume,” and “Update” ability;
• Consistent cross-channel access;
• Financial education, “what-if” calculators, and direct access to a banker or advisory specialist;
• Engagement tailored to individual customer needs;
• Automated follow-up capabilities; and
• Presentation of highly relevant offers.

ARGO recently released ARGO Accumulator, a digital financial planning solution enabling banks and credit unions to provide their customers and members with access to an interactive, goal-centric approach to personal financial planning. Institutions can cost-effectively deliver Accumulator to consumers digitally, providing automated decision functionality to guide them through the process. The solution uses data from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS) for expense comparisons and Federal Reserve Bulletin (FRB) to compare income data. Social influences such as peer comparisons provide meaningful methods of encouraging behavioral changes for goal achievement.

Needs-based in its design, Accumulator supports a true, customer focus rather than a product‑centric view. Fully integrated Omni-channel accessibility enables seamless staff assistance to further build trust and value to the customer over time. Accumulator provides bankers with full transparency into their customers’ financial objectives, self-reported data, calculations, cash flow, net worth, and an aggregated customer lifetime value index (CVI), all used to determine needs and relevant additional products and services.

ARGO Accumulator offers financial institutions tangible differentiation in the marketplace bringing considerable strength in the customer journey stages of consideration, acquisition, conversion and retention.

For more information, visit the “Accumulator: Meeting customer needs through goal-centric personal financial planning” solution brief.