The Self-Leading Customer: A new human-centred financial service

This paper refers to a Ph.D. design research, conducted in a medium sized Danish bank. The research demonstrates a human-centred perspective and resulted in a radical new type of banking service represented in the MoneyWorkshop. The MoneyWorkshop helps customers uncover their dominant values and emotions and makes them increasingly aware of their preferred personal values related to money. Participation in this workshop made customers increasingly empowered and ‘self-leading’. People even changed their ‘money behaviour’ – now in accordance with their values.
The paper explains the MoneyWorkshop and how different design elements and activities result in participants´ change in perception and ‘money-behaviour’. An overall perspective moreover explains the MoneyWorkshop in the perspective of Manz & Neck´s ideas about Self-Leadership and Thought-Self Leadership, which led to the idea about the Self-Leading Customer