Increasing the financial wellbeing of young people

This graduation project was inspired by a growing number of people that deliberately save money as a way of reclaiming the freedom to self-govern their time, energy and money. Unfortunately, little collective effort is currently being put into helping various people translate financial data into wisdom, which causes most people to still end up with obscured and chronologically fragmented transactions that fail to inform on how effortless digital payment might be endangering their dreams for the future. In 2016, the EU passed a new law called PSD2 that liberates financial data beyond banking corporations. The urgency of facilitating financial thoughtfulness without requiring extensive effort, literacy or commercial data-extraction provided a unique opportunity for the client (Nibud, the National Institute for Family Finance Information) to grow even more relevant.

A concept was developed called ‘meesparen’ (or ‘co-saving’), which is a participatory savings program that inspires and unburdens people while setting, tracking, comparing and reaching saving goals. The application helps split and dissect one’s salary into three main streams; recurring spending, free-spending and future-spending. By means of real-time comparison of saving and spending behaviour with fellow savers, people are no longer left in the lurch and are encouraged to stick with each other, eventually bringing us one step closer to finally putting money back into our hands.