Home Wealth
Preventing churn after a home purchase
Moneybox • Fintech
Results
average monthly logins, up from 2.1x
customers adopting Home Wealth
Amount of customers with meaningfully funded accounts, three months after their house purchase
Overview
Retaining home-buying customers by giving them the power to track their mortgage progress and see their home as a growing, long-term investment through tracking their home equity.
My role
Lead Product Designer, working with a large team of PMs, devs, Brand & Creative, Data and Compliance, etc.
Project challenges
Retention
Engagement
Long-term strategy
Stakeholder buy-in
Problem
Buying a home became a convenient exit point for customers
Moneybox helps first time buyers save up for their first home, through their flagship product - the Lifetime ISA. However, after customers buy their first home, we see a significant drop in engagement. Within 12 months of a home purchase, only 30% of users log in, and even fewer make new deposits. Customers also miss out on Moneybox's help on the rest of their wealth-building journey.
Metrics
How could we measure success?
Our main goal was to boost engagement, increasing monthly logins for post-purchase customers (from 2.1x). We also tracked cross-sell performance as an indicator of impact on lifetime value as a secondary metric.
Solution
Creating value for new home-owners by tracking home equity and mortgage progress
Celebrate and connect
We celebrate a customer's amazing achievement of buying a home and highlight the benefits of securely connecting their mortgage details in-app
Showcase their home equity
With a few questions, we calculate a customer's home equity (what we call their Home Wealth) and display this new form of wealth for them to see.
Monitor mortgage progress
Track details and see equity grow over time, alongside other accounts - strengthening Moneybox as a wealth building partner.
Process
Behind the scenes of Home Wealth
Prioritising our areas of focus
Equipped with all this information on homeowners' challenges, we mapped key themes that popped up and used them to create "How Might We" (HMW) questions. To help with prioritisation, I gathered key stakeholders to vote on the HMWs they felt would be most impactful to explore, which were:
Celebrating a different form of wealth
HMW help users who have just bought a new home feel positive about how their money has changed?
Decreasing mortgage in a responsible way
HMW help users compare overpaying vs. putting their money in a savings or investment account?
Managing home related costs
HMW help users balance their money between their home related costs?
Ideation
Showcasing the project's potential over a customer's lifetime
With a fantastic range of ideas from a Crazy 8s workshop, I mapped wireframes onto a timeline, based on homeownership stages, in order to showcase to stakeholders how we could re-engage customers across their home-ownership lifetime
Determining assumptions and risks in our concepts
We mapped our assumptions of our ideas in order to figure out the ideas that we were most confident in and what risks were attached to them. This guided our testing with customers, in order to ask specific questions to tackle any risky assumptions we had.
Snippet of assumption mapping for our remortgaging concept
Concept testing
Understanding what's top of mind for customers
We tested four concepts with 6 users via moderated concept testing with varying home-ownership tenures to understand customer needs and what value we could provide, and whether these concepts would compel them to revisit the page.
Learnings
Customers had no easy way to track home equity
One of our biggest learnings was that customers found it troublesome to see how their home equity grows over time, as well as not having a convenient way to view their mortgage progress, which our first concept offered. It proved to be the most popular solution, as customers loved the convenience and clarity.
The overpayment vs. saving vs. investing calculator was also a hit, but users were hesitant about investing - they were more comfortable with cash savings and saw investing as too risky.
The renovation planning tool was a good idea, but users had a hard time understanding why Moneybox would be their port of call for renovation estimates (and its impact on house price), and has doubts on the accuracy of the estimates by region.
Making improvements
Improving the home equity concept for our customer and business needs
After selecting the home equity concept, we collaborated across functions to plan implementation and gain senior stakeholder buy-in, highlighting the following key points:
Boost engagement over time
By showing monthly updates, this feature could encourage users to check in more regularly - great for tackling sustained engagement!
Ease user anxiety and motivate them to keep building their wealth
Help customers who feel they've 'lost all their money' by reminding them their wealth is in a different form, which they can continue to grow
Strategic groundwork
It laid the foundation for future ideas like remortgaging, a potential new revenue source, and a homeowner hub to expand our base and cross-sell opportunities.
UI exploration
Home Wealth: creating a 'brand' around home equity
Together with the Brand and Creative team, we decided to pitch this feature as 'Home Wealth'. This reinforced the idea that a user's wealth continues to grow, even if it's in the form of property. In terms of the look and feel, we wanted to retain a link to our Lifetime ISA product, but show how the savings have now evolved.
Challenges
How did we deal with anticipated drop off?
We broke the long flow into smaller, valuable chunks to reduce drop-off and added subtle nudges to keep users moving. The strategy: surface benefits quickly so users saw value early and stayed engaged.
What if users were hesitant to share their data?
To surface mortgage details, we linked to a credit agency’s API. Knowing users might worry about soft searches or data misuse, we worked with the Data Protection team to design a transparent screen that clearly explained what data was shared and the benefits of connecting.
Most importantly, how did we convince senior stakeholders this was a problem worth solving?
I learned that strong ideas need strong buy-in. Having seen a similar project stall due to API complexity, we streamlined discovery and engaged senior stakeholders early. By framing design decisions around customer engagement and lifetime value, we secured alignment and ensured success.
Learnings
Reflections on the project
How to win over senior stakeholders
Proactive stakeholder management was the biggest challenge. I involved senior leaders at key moments and tailored presentations to different audiences, which built trust, secured early buy-in, and allowed me to balance discovery with clear communication.
Other explorations
The future of Home Wealth
While the performance of Home Wealth did fairly well, we have a rich backlog of future possibilities to add more value to the feature and to the customers:
Next project
Driving Lifetime ISA deposits at end of tax year
Fintech
Mobile
An exploration into how we supported on-track customers to make the most of their ISA allowance
