Principle 5: Support for Financial Well-being
Digital finance products and services are designed to benefit consumers and support consumer financial well-being.
- Digital finance companies have a clear commitment to building financial well-being.
- Explicit and clearly articulated commitment to build the financial wellness of users included in a meaningful document, not just marketing materials.
- Company has built in way of measuring financial well-being.
- Company or organization demonstrates, with data, that product use supports financial well-being.
- Digital financial products and services are designed to support users’ financial well-being.
- Product does not utilize dark patterns nudging users into more costly product or services.
- Timely and actionable notifications and reminders are provided when payments are due.
- Users are not penalized for early repayment.
- Digital financial products and services facilitate savings.
- Offers round-up saving.
- Offers automated saving.
- Offers direct from paycheck saving.
- Offers regularly scheduled saving.
- Asks customers how much of their tax refund they want to put into savings before they receive the refund, and diverts the funds automatically.
- Offers an option to move all extra money left in a customer’s checking account into their savings account just before they are paid their salary each time.
- Supports savings goal-setting.
- Offers savings products built into loan plans.
- Offers other features that are supportive of saving.
- Digital financial products and services protect consumers against overextension.
- Engages in responsible lending.
- Reports loans to credit bureaus.
- Facilitates permissioned data sharing.
- Digital financial products and services help consumers reduce debt, or at least don’t exacerbate debt.
- Offers ways for customers to manage debt, such as a dashboard to see all accounts in one place, or selected debt consolidation.
- Provides referrals to debt counseling or credit counseling.
- Digital financial products and services help consumers protect or build their credit scores.
- Offers a savings feature structured as a loan that helps build credit.
- Uses cash flow-based underwriting.
- Digital financial products and services provide financial information and promote financial education.
- Provides clear information about how the offered services work and how they fit in with an individual’s larger personal financial strategy.
- Provides a dashboard that shows all of a consumer’s accounts in one place.
- Provides wealth building messaging.
- Digital financial products and services support consumers to engage in pro-financial well-being behaviors.
- Behavioral nudges.
- Just-in-time reminders and alerts about payments due, overdrafts, other time sensitive responsibilities.
- Incentives such as better interest rates or rewards for pro-FWB behaviors such as increasing savings or reducing debt.
- Supports goal setting.
- Overdraft protections.
- Offers Balance After Bills: a feature that shows the consumer how much discretionary income they will have left after their regular bills are paid.
- ffers spending analysis: a feature that shows the consumer where they are spending their money by category.
- Offers budgeting tools.
- Offers a voluntary block on spending at gambling establishments.
- Offers voluntary cash withdrawal limits that customers can set for themselves.
- Analyze eligibility for government benefits such as the EITC, notify the consumer, facilitate application for benefits.
- Digital financial products and services track their customers’ financial well-being.
- Regularly measure customers’ financial well-being with an established scale such as the CFPB’s scale and include the score as a KPI.
- Provide customer-facing tools so that customers can track their own financial well-being score.