Retirement: a Personalized, Simple and Fun User Journey

Axa is one of the world’s first companies specializing in insurance, savings and asset management. With premises in over 64 countries, it employs 165,000 people who manage 107 million customers, both businesses and individuals. In 2016, the Axa Group reported revenues of over 100 billion euros. The Group launched a massive transformation plan for 2020 to become the leader in insurance innovation and give everyone the means to live a better life.

Giving everyone the means to live a better life today and tomorrow, in a world that is constantly changing, implies truly partnering with customers to create personalized services and solutions that meet their needs. This was the context in which Axa decided to approach Valtech to benefit from its service design experience. The Group wanted to inspire people in the 30-35 age group to realize the importance of preparing for retirement well in advance. The digital agency provided the appropriate response, offering Axa the chance to prototype a retirement simulator.

Valtech imagined and designed a mobile responsive application with an original and unique journey, offered to Axa’s 9 million customers in France first of all.

To instil trust between the user and the insurer, Valtech decided to create a program that is both educational and fun: the user answers personal questions without an impression of intrusion, thanks to an original Q&A game and a persona who most closely resembles him or her: fashionista, geek, sporty type, music fan…

The simulator then determines the user’s risk of facing a shortfall in income after retirement, and the amount to save each month from now on in order to avoid it. 

At each stage in the journey, the user may access more accurate information about France’s retirement system or the formulae and data used by the simulator in its calculations.

Users can use the simulator as many times as they wish. The deliberately off-the-wall tone and particularly cheerful graphic style with vivid colours incite them to do so.

The true-to-life, personalized estimate via the video-game-like application enables Valtech’s prototype to generate leads.

Valtech succeeded brilliantly in rising to the challenge of enabling people to learn about savings products, through an original user journey. Thanks to the application, user proximity was created and nurtured, giving rise in the end to brand preference. The prototype designed by Valtech was acclaimed during user tests and reached its objective: to create awareness and incite people to contact Axa for retirement advice. The prototype was translated into English and shared in four new countries covered by the Group. The target audience was broadened to include people aged 35-40.