Measure Twice, Cut Once: What Pilots Can Reveal About Serving YouthSavers

Almost 40,000 youth are now saving in accounts rolled out under the YouthSave project. But before scaling their youth savings accounts, three of our partner banks started small – with pilots designed to test whether they had really understood what young savers wanted. Though piloting is a time-tested method for getting products right, a surprising number of banks still do not use them. A new report documents how HFC Bank, Kenya Postbank, and Bank of Kathmandu conducted their pilot tests and used the lessons to ensure their products successfully served youth.

YouthSave pilots were designed to answer three main questions:

1. Product uptake: Would young people actually open the kinds of accounts the market research had said they wanted?

2. Account usage: What kinds of balances would youth keep in these accounts, and how often would they transact?

3. Customer satisfaction: How did youth savers think and feel about their experience with the accounts?

To minimize the risk of product copying by other banks, the pilots lasted no more than six months, were conducted in a limited set of branches, and involved no mass media marketing. So their results were more clues to future product performance than conclusive answers to the questions above. Nonetheless, starting small yielded a number of valuable insights that provided reassurance that our partner banks were on the right track, evidence for course corrections – or sometimes both.

Product uptake: Three factors set the pace of account openings. - The importance of accessibility – both physical and social/legal – was highlighted by youth response to the accounts. All three banks therefore set up mechanisms to make physical access easier (e.g. mobile/agent banking), and also expanded the list of identity documents they would accept from youth. But since all three countries require accounts to be opened with a trusted adult, this remains a challenge to access for many of the most marginalized young people. - The pilots also revealed that marketing to youth alone was not enough to realize account openings. Because of the trusted adult requirements, marketing activities that touched youth and adults together resulted in higher numbers of accounts opened. - Finally, institutional alignment – particularly the support and buy-in of branch staff – was credited with much of the difference in performance within a given bank. When typical methods of educating staff about a new product proved inadequate, bank and YouthSave teams organized face-to-face trainings and periodic conference calls between branch staff and senior managers.

Account usage: While pilots are by design short-term, usage patterns typically play out over a longer term. But the pilots provided early indications that youth were indeed willing to save in these accounts, and also suggested that balances should grow over time. In all three countries, the number of deposits swamped withdrawals – in Nepal by a factor of 218!

Customer satisfaction: Through surveys and focus groups, youth in all three countries indicated that bank staff were friendly, approachable, and helpful. We also heard that having a bank account made them feel important and “grown-up”. But what they perhaps most appreciated was knowing the accounts were really theirs; in fact, especially among older youth, there was a desire for even more ownership through independent control of their accounts. In Nepal, customer feedback also revealed an opportunity to dramatically simplify account design without reducing the product’s appeal – allowing BoK to focus its resources on what truly mattered to youth.

In the year since rollout, many of the trends signaled during the pilots have been borne out. But perhaps the clearest case for piloting comes from what happened after the pilots, when the accounts went into full-scale rollout. Based on the numbers of accounts opened (shown in the accompanying graph), the pilots appear to have fulfilled their role as “early warning systems”, providing a preview of what banks would need to focus on, or let go of, in order to most successfully serve youth savers.