FinancialFitness

Inspiration

There are dime a dozen financial coaching and advising apps on the market. At some point we've all taken a quiz and gotten a picture of our financial lives along with some recommendations for what we could do to keep improving -- most commonly, thoughts on how best to pay off a mortgage coupled with a dig at our "overly conservative" investment strategy. When clients at Mission Asset Fund receive this advice, they may feel confused and frustrated. "I just told you that I don't own any major assets because I moved to this country only two years ago and that I don't have any savings because I'm still supporting my family back home. How can these be the right next steps for me?" When a client walks through MAF's doors asking how to improve their financial well being, how can we meet people where they're at, with advice and resources that are relevant for them? And how can we make sure that what content we deliver is readily actionable?

What it does

Our mobile app* addresses these challenges by providing a one stop shop for financial coaching. We ask the users to tell us a little about themselves and, based on their answers, continually suggest resources like financial videos, tips, and nearby services that meet the needs they report. Users have the ability to save resources to view later and create an action plan to track goals and follow through with the resources they find helpful.

How we built it

This app leverages native mobile technology, in order to provide the best possible experience to MAF's largely mobile first clients. We sourced survey and resource content from MAF's Salesforce instance, allowing MAF staff to easily customize the user flows from their end, so they can maintain up-to-date information and stay responsive to customer feedback. The questions and resources we used were developed specifically for lower income communities by the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau.

Challenges we ran into

Salesforce being new platform to the whole team was a challenge to understand at first.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Mission Asset Fund was able to identify several pain points that their users experienced in trying to navigate the financial system using the existing resources available to them. Our team was able to leverage our expertise in iOS, Swift and Salesforce to help alleviate them, developing an innovative solution that affords users a clear, customized, and streamlined experience in achieving financial well-being.