New approaches to banking for the older old

The aim of this project was to work closely with people in their eighties and nineties to make recommendations for new and more inclusive banking products that meet their real needs. These needs are illustrated by designs for innovative and provocative technology.

At the time of the 2001 census there were 2.4m people aged 80 or more in the UK. Life expectancy at age 80 is now 9 years for men and 11 for women. They have experiences very different from the age cohorts that follow them and many do not use the banking facilities that their children take for granted.
The first part of the work was to gain an understanding of the world of payments and money as it was seen by our participants. This required the development of a new ethnographic technique, the 'financial biography'. This identified a number of pervasive values such: keeping control over one's finances, trust, helping one another and being helped oneself. In addition, we identified a number of practical problems particularly delegating simple financial tasks to a helper.

In the second part of the work we developed new methods to involve our eighty year olds in the co-design of provocative prototypes. They were enraged by the plan to scrap cheques and one of the provocative prototypes was an 'electronic cheque' that used a special pen with a paper cheque to initialise an instant electronic payment. They also explored solutions to the problem of remembering PINs and we built a biometrically protected PIN reminder. The final prototype showed how a 'helper's card' could be used to give limited access to someone else's bank account in terms of how much could be spent. The account holder could also set a time when the delegation would expire, thus making it useless to a thief.

A final project aim was that the recommendations should be "research-user friendly" so that they are taken up by financial service providers, hence reducing the number of financially excluded individuals in the UK. We have found the provocative prototypes most useful in explaining the needs of our participants. We had interest and made new contacts in the payments industry from press coverage and from our presence at a conference for banks and payment equipments suppliers. We have also made contact with a variety of legislators and policy makers through a 'lunch seminar' at a restaurant in Westminster. The Payments Council have engaged fully with what we are doing and we will be taking forward our relationship with them through collaborations in the coming months. This is a massive industry with, at the time of writing, many pressing concerns. I am afraid that it may be a little while before the problems faced by the older old are all solved.