Financial Coaching Goes Social

In the case of pre-existing digital technology applications that allow users to make investments, better known as fintech (derived from the words finance and technology), the user lacked a specific site in which they were able to compare the pros and cons of both the applications themselves and of the different financial instruments offered by the great diversity of platforms that have emerged in the last few years.

With this observation in mind, Opinno set out to design a new digital investment service that offered a differential value when compared to the rest of large banks. And what better way to set aside the classic commercial approach (that only sells the benefits of its products) than to partner with Opinno, a company outside of these commercial interests. In general, people do not trust commercial interests, they trust the institutions and people they know and respect.

Faced with this ideology, the Opinno team saw a clear opening of business opportunity: the creation of a social network specifically dedicated to investment, through which it would also be possible to invest.

Opinno saw this as an opportunity to design a service for clients with little time and knowledge, and low confidence in the markets. Thus, Opinno addressed this opportunity by creating a social-investment coaching system based on connecting trustworthy people.

So Opinno decided to create the first social network for financial coaching, in which the unfamiliar user can be advised on financial investment topics by people he or she trusts.

The search

To face this challenge, the Opinno team applied the Design Thinking process (set of creative procedures that involve the potential user in the design of a product) that would allow the team to carry out the segmentation by empathy, which was then combined with a mapping of the latest trends in fintech to identify product positioning opportunities.

Subsequently, experts in the field were consulted, both internal as well as external, to design the value proposition, and generating the backlog (list) of functionalities that the team thought the product should possess. From there, these functionalities were prototyped, and tested with agile methodology in three iterations until the final product was found: a social network for financial coaching.

Thus, Opinno decided to create the first financial coaching social network, in which the unfamiliar user will be advised on a related matter by a more knowledgeable person whom he or she trusts.