Taken from article here, photographer: Unknown
How might we solve for climate change effects on our property market in the next 100 years?
The problem
With climate change impacting the stability of the future property market, we know this will also impact NAB’s portfolio and ultimately it’s customers. We were tasked with exploring ways to approach customers here, whilst building an internal tool that would help NAB make better decisions on climate risk.
My role here
UI/UX and rapid prototyping
Design methods coaching
Workshop facilitation
Customer research
Data visualisation
Defining the problem space
We knew the scope of this problem was two-fold:
The customer problem: How can approach voicing and approaching climate risk from a customer point of view?
The internal problem: How can we equip NAB to build insight internally?
What is Climate risk?
Also interchanged with, “physical risk”, climate risk here refers to the phsyical damage a property can sustain due to climate related events eg. flood risk/bushfire risk
Research and exploration
After working with stakeholders, data scientists and global insurance providers to gather requirements we then;
Conducted generative research to understand how customers are thinking about climate risk and their properties
Designed a dashboard for our internal strategy teams, allowing them to factor climate risk into NAB’s property portfolio.
Key Findings
Customers do not factor climate risk into their home buying journey at present, as they already have many competing priorities when purchasing a new property.
The climate risk dashboard which I had designed as an MVP, proved sucessful and is currently being integrated into NAB’s internal pricing systems.
Sacrificial concept above: Property app that notifies customer of a potentially risky property purchase
Workshop board above: Setup for team to flesh out risky assumptions + key hypotheses to test
How we explored the customer angle
We undertook a series of 1:1 customer interviews to understand how customers might feel about NAB offering them property risk advice.
Broadly, we wanted to understand NAB’s right to play in the climate and property space and we believed that customers will not factor climate risk into their property purchase. We tested 2 concepts with customers.
Concept 1 (Proactive approach): A property app which told the customer upfront that their property purchase was a, “high risk” purchase
Concept 2 (Reactive approach): An eDM which told customers they already owned a “high risk” property.
We found: Customers preferred to be given physical risk recommendations upfront, but as customers already have many competing priorities when purchasing a property, climate risk is deprioritised.
An interesting find: All participants who lived in inner city/CBD believed their properties were not susceptible to climate risk…
“This has been an eye opener for me, I’m going to do my research now”
- Participant verbatim
How we approached this issue internally; designing a climate risk MVP for NAB’s pricing and strategy team
I designed an MVP which features climate risk displayed at a national, suburb and individual property level.
This dashboard also factors in current pricing metrics such as “Loss Given Default” and different forms of risk exposure.
MVP was designed to facilitate decision making of NAB’s internal pricing and strategy team - this team decides what areas of Australia’s property market are most viable to invest in. This tool would exist alongside their current workflow.
I worked with data, climate scientists, stakeholders, insurance providers and our back office team to define requirements and outputs
Design output was kept as simplified as possible to allow for easy build in PowerBI, which I worked with the developer to help build.
Today
Output is being used as a starting point to reconfigure NAB’s portfolio strategy, factoring in climate risk.