Designing a robo-advisor for risk-averse, low-budget consumers

Banks have reacted much more enthusiastically to the FinTech revolution than many of their customers. Robo-advisory, automated web-based investment advisory, in particular promises many advantages for both banks and customers - but consumer adoption has been slow so far. Recent studies suggest that this might be due to a mix of low trust in banks, high expectations of transparency and general inability or unwillingness to engage with investment questions. Research in decision support and guidance shows customers’ willingness to interact with a decision support tool depends greatly on its usability. We identify requirements for robo-advisory, derive design principles and evaluate them in two iterations with a real robo-advisor in a controlled laboratory study. The evaluation results confirm the validity of our identified design principles.