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Interview guide

Welcome

Welcome. I’m ___________ and I’m joined by _________.

Thanks for taking time to chat to us today as part of our research. With the world of work changing and growth of the gig economy, freelance work, part-time work etc we are doing into the kind of financial services that would be of value to freelancers and contractors.

We know you’re busy, so we promise not to take more than 30-45 minutes of your time.

We’re looking for a fresh perspective on an idea we’re working on. We’ll be asking you a lot of questions, but we are not testing you, we are testing our idea! There are no right or wrong answers.

We promise to keep your personal information a secret and will not share your details with anyone. If any point a question makes you uncomfortable, please just say skip the at question.

Are you OK for us to record the session?

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Opening Questions

Demographic (race, age, city)

Tell me a little about yourself, and what you do for a living.

If employed (part-time or full-time), does your employer manage benefits, retirement, investment or savings accounts on your behalf?

Do you receive any financial guidance / education from your employer?

If freelancing, how have you been managing your personal savings, investments finances? Prompts:

Timesheets and invoicing

Budgets

Tax returns

Do you have insurance? Prompts:

Medical aid and gap cover

Funeral

Life cover

Critical Illness

Income protection

Do you have a financial adviser?

What prompted you and when did you start using one?

What is working well / what isn’t working well?

Do you regularly save or invest any money in any of the following: (Select multiple)

Savings accounts

Pension fund

Retirement Annuity

Tax free savings account

Unit trusts

Money market

Business investment

Stocks

Piggy bank

Stokvels

Crypto

Livestock

If so, what are your savings goals?

What factors determine where you save or invest your money? Prompts:

Fees

Returns

Risk appetite

Security

Ease of access

Community or recommendation

What do you use to get through a tough spot during the month? Which instruments have you used?

How do you deal with emergencies? Do you have an emergency fund?

On a scale of 1 to 10, how confident are you about your current and future financial situation?

How do you currently manage your tax returns?

Introduce Prototype

We have created a mock-up of an idea that we are investigating that we want you to look at and give us feedback. Can we show you?

What do you understand the concept to be?

What immediate questions come to mind?

What do you like?

What don’t you like?

What is not clear?

What else would you have liked to see?

How much do you think it costs?

Debrief

If this was available today, how would you use it?

May we put your name on the list of pilot customers?

Any final thoughts?

Thanks for coming through.

Discovery workshop

Project Context

What is the current state of the project? What work has been done on the project to date? What are the project road blocks? What are the project timelines?

Desired Business Outcome (North Star Ambition):

As you are aware, the Investo business under Momentum Life provides Retirement Annuity products into the SA Market.

Apart from being a relatively small business at the moment, with approximately 380k policies in market, the Investo business is modelled to have a 1% decline in its policy holder base a year going forward.

Whilst they’ve managed to have a good last year (raising market share to 18,6% and nipping attrition to c.0,5%), the reality is that current business initiatives are only likely to keep numbers flat…this venture is thus the major growth push for the business

In terms of ambitions, it is hoped that the venture that we look at provides a growth engine for the business to grow to c.450k policy holders by 2030…that equates to a challenge of acquiring c.80k net new policy holders over the next 6 years, a material shift from current.

In terms of the Opportunity Space that was identified from a Prepared Minds session that was done with the Investo Leadership Team, trends such as SA’s significant Unemployment rate and other shifts were noted as driving the Investo business to need to look at offerings that could appeal to a population that was not going to have “traditional employment” (8-5 jobs, paid on the same day monthly and thus able to sign up for traditional Retirement Annuities) but rather was going to need to be able to cater to those who had far more variable income sources e.g. Gig workers and the like

Additionally, it was noted that there was a lack of understanding as to the mindsets and pain points of this population base in that questions such as whether the concept of “Retirement” held merit for gig workers or whether we knew what this market wanted to save for – there was thus a need to better understand the opportunity space

It is clear to the team that we are not looking here for a simple “market access/distribution” play that could then sell current Investo products (this is not “lipstick on the pig”) but rather we are looking for a genuine attempt to develop a new, designed-for-digital market offering (with appropriate business and operating models, partnerships and technology choices) that would allow this to be a proper Engine Two Growth engine for the business, driving competitiveness in a market segment where we don’t reach at this point

How we want to approach this:

To solve for the Opportunity Space above, we are looking for a 12 week process with your venture studio (in partnership with the M2X team) that will be set out as follows:

First Phase (6 weeks)

Market Insights and Understanding – engaging with potential customers to delve into pain points and really understand the opportunity in terms of what we are looking to solve for

Market Sizing – Leveraging quantitative and qualitative analysis to size the size of the opportunity

Identification of both local and international solutions and technologies that might be in development or in market (even if these are not exactly what we are looking to develop as a total solution) to give us a sense of both what we may be competing with and who we might be able to partner with – we will have support in this from Silicon Foundry which is our international M2X support partner

High Level Testing of potential solutions – high level views on what solutions would potentially be attractive to the target markets, thus allowing us to achieve the desired North Star business outcome

At the end of 6 weeks, we present this to the Business Led Growth Board that makes a call on whether the opportunity space is attractive enough to want to proceed with potential MVP design and testing – this is the first Go/No-Go point

Second Phase (6 weeks)

Should the Growth Board opt to continue to phase two the team then works to design potential proposition offerings and test these with potential customers to validate where there are opportunities that the business could successfully pursue

Included in the above are views on Business and Operating Models, Potential Partners and Technology options that could support this proposed offering

At the end of the 6 weeks, the aim is to present a view on an investment case that would seek to show:

That there is a large enough opportunity that we have a potential solution for (validated by potential customers)

That there is an investable business and operating model that would sit behind this

That this would leverage MMH Assets in order to give us an “unfair advantage” if we entered this space (which is important as this shows why we as an incumbent should look to develop this rather than leave it to others)

Again, at the end of this 6 weeks, there is a go/no-go point where the business growth board will look at the potential solution and opportunity space and make a call as to whether this is an opportunity that we would want to then take past validation and look at then investing in building this solution and taking to market

At the end of 12 weeks, should there be an investable case made to build this out into a business, we would then seek to create the squad (that would include both our Venture Studio Partner, Business Team as well as other members including partners, technology players and the bringing in of a potential Entrepreneur in Residence to lead this should it be necessary) that be given a first series of funding to start building out the MVP and taking this to market – the aim would be to fund this team for a period of time e.g. 6 months with further funding rounds awarded based on delivery and performance, thus avoiding the issue that MMH has had with large amounts of spend on delivery that does not show market results

Parameters for the delivery of the 12 weeks:

We would need FFwD to staff a venture team that would be able to carry the brunt of the work needed to achieve the above outcomes - this would include skills such as leading the venture, VP development and testing, market analysis, design etc.

The business will not at the start be deploying full time resources onto the initiative but will:

Appoint a business lead who will work alongside yourselves and myself to oversee the work on a daily basis

Staff an oversight Growth Board which will meet at the end of 2 weekly sprints for feedback as well as at the 2 Go/No Go points to make the decisions on progressing with the work. This Board will be chaired by Stan and will include other members such as the group CDTO (Dhesen), other Investo Leadership team members and 2-3 independent, experienced venture builders/investors there to provide that outside in view

For the 12 weeks of effort, we have an approved budget of R1,5m (excl VAT) that we will need to keep to

A key outcome that we would need to look at is how we bring in the right partners to support on market accessibility, technology etc.

Key considerations:

Developing a deep understanding of the potential customer market – the emerging market household, informal work sector (gig workers and the like) are not core customers of a business like Investo and understanding the pain points and needs (both unmet and partially met) of these customers is quite crucial to being able to define an offering that is genuinely attractive.

What is the real, disposable income of these customers and how does it change from month to month?

How do these customers think about saving and investing for the future? What do they think is worth saving and investing for and over what time horizons?

What role do groups e.g Families, communities play in savings and investments – are individuals more likely to save/invest in groups or as individuals and are there times where they are prepared to assist each other?

How do these customers think about about “retirement”? Is this a concept that has meaning to them?

What mechanisms currently exist to enable savings and investment? What is it about formal savings and investment products that don’t meet the needs of customers? Are there currently informal mechanisms that are filling these gaps?

Are there partners who we can identify who might offer us both insights into these markets and potentially paths to market penetration/distribution

E,g, if we are talking about something accessible to Gig Workers, is there the potential to partner with platforms e.g. Uber, Shoprite etc to provide an offering directly through them for workers rather than rely on our own D2C acquisition?

Project Goals

What is the short-term goal? What is the long-term goal? What are the project’s success metrics? Example: Revenue, users, engagement, ROI.

Grow to c.450k policy holders by 2030…that equates to a challenge of acquiring c.80k net new policy holders over the next 6 years, a material shift from current.

Any other goals?

Inherent to the above is the sustainability and feasibility of the solution from the Investo perspective. This is highly likely to be a newly developed solution (business model, operating model (acquisition and service), technology and partners) rather than a different approach to distributing current products and thus it will need to take this investment and the capabilities needed into account.

Questions / Assumptions

What questions do we need to answer? What are the key assumptions and hypothesis we want to test? Examples: Who is our target market? What pricing model should we adopt? Which technologies should be considered? Will the solution reduce churn? Translate into ‘How Might We’s: HMW validate that we have the right target market?

Which Customer Segments should be targeted with which Customer Value Propositions (CVPs)

How would we reach the target segments and geographies? (Sales and Distribution Channels) What is the GTM plan?

What should the user journey look like to activate the offerings?

How will we service customers/service points? We need to align customer segments, products and service points.

Which products should we lead with? How do we prioritise and rationalise the offering? Less is more.

How will we differentiate our offering from competitors? (both formal and potentially informal mechanisms serving these needs)

Do we need partners (for customer acquisition / servicing / technology / equity)? Important!

What is our North Star Metric? How do we measure success?

Identify the key processes that needs to be reengineered.

How will we achieve alignment between different business functions/entities/channels/value streams?

Can we map the products to segments (personas), channels, service management, risk management, social impact etc?

Which data points needs to be tracked?

Objective & Prompt

You are a market research expert that is going to help me identify what problem to solve for my MVP’s go to market.

I am building a digital product for freelancers and self-employed people in South Africa. This product is going to focus on helping this segment with a financial pain point they are experiencing e.g. Tax, Timesheets & Invoicing, Insurance, Saving & Retirement, Financial planning .

I am running a survey with 300 people in this segment and need your help with coming up with the questions that will help me identify the biggest painpoint and opportunity area to build a product around for my go to market. I will be able to monetise in the future through selling insurance and other financial services but first, I need to get users by building something that people need;

Some ideas for how I want to uncover painpoints: How do you currently do it (way they currently do it)

Which parts they love and hate - where do frustrations come from?

Actively searching for replacement product or method?

If so, why haven’t you found one?

Are you losing money with current tool/method?

How do you normally solve x?

How much time does it typically take?

How much does it typically cost?

I need you to come up with survey questions that will help me achieve this goal of identifying the biggest painpoint people experience - one they would be willing to spend money on solving. Because it is likely to save them money because it will help them reduce their costs (tax, expense management) or increase their income (more interest or investment income, faster payments, better work delivery etc.)

These questions must:

Profile behaviour associated with our categories - usage etc

Gather methods or providers they use to do behaviour

Gauge how severe painpoint is or understand if they have an issue with the current way of doing things

You must be strategic and tactical with these questions, making sure not to bias the respondent.

Here are some generic questions from an interview that could help you with multiple choice answers. Put more emphasis on what I said about than these points but still consider them.