The Elderly Deserve a More Personal Approach by the Payments and Banking Industry

So last time I discussed why the elderly might need their own personal approach in the payments customer experience. The reason is of course that this segment will grow larger and larger over the next couple of years. More and more people get retired and on top of that there are the developments in healthcare and better life circumstances that allow them to live longer.

On a macro-economic level governments are dealing with this by increasing the retirement ages, but that will likely not be sufficient to support this growing group of old people. It looks like they must find their own funds to survive. One way is the pension savings, on corporate level as well as on personal. Another could be support by their children maybe. My last blog explained that years ago in Europe elderly would live together with their children, and that individualism and desire of both partners to work and to make career made this impossible over years. I do not expect our society will evolve to exactly that same thing, but support in another form, maybe simply financially.

We’ll come back on that later. First let us have a look at the reactions I had so far on my last blog. One of the comments was the question whether this would mean this should be leading to moving away from the internet. Personally I disagree with this. Two main reasons are: (a) the group that is getting older is becoming more and more accustomed to life with internet, and (b) I believe the best technology should be used to create a user friendly environment for a certain segment, also for the elderly of course. Internet is part of our life, and it will be more and more available on a permanent basis 24/7. And if internet can offer the best solutions, then why shouldn't we?

A lot of the people that will become part of the retired elderly over the next the coming years have been using internet at work. So they know the internet and they know how to work with it. Then you have the people that didn’t use the internet at work, but are accustomed to this thanks to their private use. Only small parts of the new elderly don’t know how to work with it. And they can be educated I believe, as long as the solutions remain user-friendly!

Cards will likely play an important role in looking for solutions for the elderly. Rahul made a very good point there with the idea of revising the display card to make life simpler for them. This does make sense of course, as VISA Surecode for example seems simpler than Vasco’s digipass for example (with M1 and M2 codes...), although the challenge will be to keep the same security measures of the more mature technologies. Another, simple, development could simply be a bigger font size for the characters on the card.

Lawrence R. Greenberg suggested thinking in terms of delegation. Very smart idea I think. If things do become hard to follow, it could be wise to delegate these things to people that do know what to do with it. Same can be done for payments, like Lawrence said: “Some of the features available in a corporate setting need to be scaled down and given simple user interface for wealthy individual and their children”. The elderly sure want to follow-up on their financial situation, and that is where the user-friendly internet could play an important role.

Rahul Ramakrishnan continued with this idea on the fraud aspect of this solution. Personalized on-call service for high-value transactions, video-call with the banks for performing transactions do make sense, for the wealthiest segment. Limits and call-back procedures are also reasonable for a lower segment, and required for solutions like this.

Prakash Sambandam highlighted the idea of biometric for the elderly. In India there seems to be a to-the-door service with biometric devices, to increase financial inclusion. Indeed, this is also a point that I put forward in my biometric posts last year. In South Africa for example pension payments were simple done with a fingerprint. The motivation there was illiteracy, in this brainstorm it could be the difficulty of remembering a PIN-code. In the Netherlands this was also one of the reasons for people to pay with a fingerprint. Now I am not saying fingerprints are the solution, but I believe in the domain of fingerprint the elderly could be a potential target, after further developments in this science in order to get a waterproof solution.

A final point is the financial thing I would come back to. In the UK government institutions are moving towards pension prepaid cards (next to other social welfare payments). I think this is a great idea, not because of the elimination of cash that can be enhanced at the same time, but the separate account that becomes available. Account? Indeed. As they have a prepaid card they also have a miror account where the prepaid money is held. It is on that account that the government, or other institutions, could transfer their money to, like pensions money.

With the right setup they are not the only ones who can top up these accounts. And that brings us back to the beginning of this post. If this account could be set up in such a way that it also promotes for example the children of the elderly to top up the account, then we get back to an economy where the elderly ‘invest’ in their children and their development in the beginning and they get their 'return' later as these children can support their parents by sending them money if there is a need for it. That way you create a social welfare account that will not be used for savings of course, but for daily living only, with the idea that the money on the account is, let’s say, enough to survive for a month.

If this could be combined with the idea that were found previously where children manage the account and monitor when to top up or not, you might get a game changing innovation, not because of new technology, but because of a new use of already existing technologies. 

The normal bank account could be used for the electric bills and renting the retirement room for example, daily consumption spending could be done with the prepaid card. They don't have to be bothered by the utility expenses, as their children could take care of that. And a simple periodic account statement could help them to stay updated on their financial situation.

Do you also think this is worth investigating?