Lumiant wins Good Design Award as it reimagines advice experience

Lumiant wins Good Design Award as it reimagines advice experience

Lumiant, a cloud-based behavioural finance and client experience platform, has won a prestigious Gold Good Design Award Winner Accolade in the Good Design Awards for Design Excellence. The winners of Australia’s peak international design awards were announced during the 2021 Good Design Awards Week.

The Australian Good Design Awards is the country’s oldest and most prestigious international awards for design and innovation, with a proud history dating back to 1958. The Awards celebrate the best new products and services on the Australian and international market, excellence in architectural design, precinct design, engineering, fashion, digital and communication design, and reward new and emerging areas of design, including design strategy, social impact design, design research and up-and-coming design talent in the Next Gen category.

Built for financial advisers by financial advisers, Lumiant is on a mission to transform how advice is delivered. It has invested heavily in the design, user interface and user experience of its platform. Its structured and robust software supported advice process places client values at the heart of the experience, giving money meaning and empowering clients to live their best lives.

Lumiant’s behavioural finance and client experience platform received a prestigious Gold Good Design Award Winner Accolade in the Design Strategy category in recognition for outstanding design and innovation.

The Good Design Awards Jury praised Lumiant, commenting:

“A great example of a well-executed service design platform and business model, which has emerged through the identification of an unmet need in the financial advice industry. Using life goals to drive financial literacy is such a smart and important innovation. You have mastered the artistry of final state mapping (via projections) to get people engaged now, and put the power in their hands, while exceeding regulatory demands and staying ahead of further potential regulatory frameworks. You have managed to reimagine a highly constrained industry with an elegant and engaging end to end experience for advisers and their clients. Hopefully, this has a strong positive impact on many people’s lives. Congratulations.”

Santiago Burridge, CEO of Lumiant, believes the award is a testament to the team’s hard work in delivering something unique to the financial advice industry that challenges the traditional norms.

“The financial services sector has been through significant change. Technology continues to drive new business models, from neobanks to micro-investing. At the same time, regulations push the industry towards a client-centric, robust operating model. Yet, with all this change, little has been done to update the experience,” he said.

“The current experience is anchored in financial products, compliance and addressing the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of the house. This has made the advice experience very transactional, focusing on financial goals, performance and benchmarks. We wanted to change that.”

Lumiant worked with a close-knit team of financial advisers and brought in third-party human-centred design consultancy Tobias to turn the experience on its head. Instead of focusing on financial performance, Lumiant engages clients around their wellbeing. Focusing on what matters most to the ‘non-CFO’ spouse, who runs the family and measures success based on how closely they live their lives aligned to their values.

“With everything that has happened in the world over the last two years, we’re starting to see more people wake up and ask what they are doing with their lives. They might have managed to save some money during lockdown or had an A-HA moment and want to try something completely different. The old approach to financial advice would have crunched the numbers and come up with a strategy to accumulate wealth irrespective of your dreams,” continued Burridge.

“We’ve changed that. Working in partnership with Advisers, we can now have much better conversations with clients to understand what they truly value in life and what they want to achieve. And then have meaningful conversations where we discuss financial trade-offs to help them live their best life as quickly as possible.”

The 2021 Good Design Awards attracted a record number of submissions, with 933 design projects evaluated by more than 70 Australian and international Jurors, including designers, engineers, architects and thought leaders. Each entry was evaluated according to a strict set of design evaluation criteria which includes good design, design innovation and design impact.

Projects recognised with an Australian Good Design Award demonstrate excellence in professional design and highlight the impact a design-led approach has on business success and social and environmental outcomes.