Savers to Investors

Authored the design brief and behaviour-change strategy helping 1.6 million cash-heavy savers take a confident first step into investing.

The Problem

A large group of Lloyds Banking Group customers hold significant cash savings that lose real value to inflation over time, yet have never invested. Prior attempts to move them toward investing had low take-up: the products felt built for people who already understood markets, not for someone taking a genuinely first step. The bank needed a way in that matched where these customers actually were, not where the industry assumed they should be.

The brief: give cash-heavy savers a guided, reversible first step into investing that matches how they actually think about risk.

My role / the team

I authored the design brief and behaviour-change strategy for the MVP, working with a wealth product lead and two researchers ahead of a 2026 delivery squad being staffed. The brief is now the reference document the delivery team is building against.

What The Evidence Said

Segmentation work identified cash-heavy savers as a distinct group from existing investors — cautious, self-taught, and put off by jargon rather than by risk itself. Behavioural research found that framing investing as a small, reversible first step increased stated intent far more than framing it around long-term returns. And qualitative interviews surfaced guidance, not tools, as the thing this group actually trusted.

The Judgment Calls

Scoping the MVP to two segments, and deliberately excluding two others.

Four candidate segments were in scope for the wider programme. I scoped the MVP to just Explorers and Beginners — the two groups closest to acting — and explicitly excluded two more sceptical segments from Day 1, even though it meant a smaller initial addressable group. Trying to convince the sceptics first would have slowed everything down.

A hybrid Save & Invest journey, over a pure invest push.

Early concepts pushed customers straight into an investment product. I redesigned the journey as a hybrid: customers keep saving while a small, clearly-labelled portion moves into a simple investment — because research showed a total switch felt like a loss of control, while a hybrid felt like an extension of a habit they already trusted.

Guidance over tools.

The product team’s instinct was to ship comparison tools and calculators. I argued the brief around plain-language guidance instead — this group didn’t lack access to tools, they lacked confidence to use them — which shaped the entire MVP around explanation, not configuration.

The Design

The first-step framing, tested against long-term return framing.

The hybrid Save & Invest split, shown before commitment.

Plain-language guidance replacing a calculator-first approach.

What Shipped & What Happened

The brief and MVP scope are approved and the delivery squad is being staffed for 2026. It’s too early for shipped-product metrics; what’s known qualitatively is that the hybrid framing tested significantly better with the target segments than any prior investing concept the bank had put in front of them.

What I’d Do Differently

I’d want quantitative validation of the hybrid framing earlier — the qualitative signal is strong, but a brief this central to a 2026 roadmap deserves a small live experiment before full build, and I’d push for that sequencing next time.