Financial accessibility
Transforming the Dutch Housing market
For Rabobank
Team Project
5 team members | 5 months | 2020
Client
Rabobank
Process
Service / Strategic design | Creative Facilitation | Participatory Research
Outcome
Research insights | Future vision | Social (corporate) start-up concept
Challenge
Starters in the Dutch housing market are stuck because they are forced to pay high rent in the middle segment and can hardly accumulate any savings. Their income is too high for social housing and too low to get a mortgage.
Our challenge was to help Rabobank exercise its societal role and expand its mortgage portfolio by building a social corporate start-up from inside the bank that transforms the traditional housing market, especially for starters.
Participatory research to empathize with starters
To empathize with our target audience, we did 12 in-depth interviews, enhanced with pre-interview sensitizing booklets. This revealed rich insights about their underlying pains, needs, and motivations about topics like ownership, co-owning, future goals, and the housing market. In addition, a quantitative survey with over 100 people was done to validate our qualitative insights.
Example of filled-in sensitizing booklet
“For me, it’s more important to let my freedom and career choose what I want - than to own a house that will condition my decisions.”
— Research participant
Envisioning the world of 2030
To make the future context of our target audience more tangible we created a fake newspaper from the year 2030. This provocative manifestation helped us in the process of designing a future-proof value proposition. The content of the newspaper was based on the context cards that were the result of our trend research.
Context cards capturing insights from trend research
Creative facilitation
To generate original ideas from different angles I facilitated digital creative sessions with stakeholders from Rabobank and our target audience. In addition, internal ideation sessions were done with the team, exploiting our own creativity.
The GIF is an example of an energizer we often did.
Outcome
The Cloud Factory as a means to transform the current housing market
This concept shifts the current housing market to a decentralized network of houses, supported and co-owned by its users. This idea rethinks the idea of “owning”. When transitioning to the new market (cloud market), people will become co-owners of the entire housing market, instead of owners of their houses.
Landing page prototype - used as a validation tool
How does it work?
To boost financial stability and market accessibility —
The Cloud Factory acts as a financial corporate start-up that gradually transforms the old housing market to a radically new housing market.
The factory recruits houses once they become available for sale. Once they are bought they enter the factory and can then be moved into the cloud market.
At the same time, house-seekers can create their piece of cloud at the factory. In reality, this is a financial investment customers make in the factory.
Customers can choose HOW to make their investment. They can combine renting and buying in one piece of cloud.
Once customers made their investment, they can move into a house suitable to the amount of their investment and enter the cloud market.
This service offers the freedom to combine monthly payments (like rent) with buying shares, ending the rent-buying duality.
Something I learned …
Leadership in times of uncertainty
In this project, I was assigned the project lead in a team consisting of 6 amazing students from different design masters. We started the project just before the pandemic happened, so quickly Miro and Zoom became our new (beloved)
collaboration & co-creation tools. During this process, I discovered that in my role I was able to develop trust, connectivity, adaptivity and team strength, by really preserving fun, health, and wellbeing throughout the entire process.
“ Kari is our zen & never-resting brain. As our project leader, she acts like a compass steering the group in the right direction. More reliable than a sherpa in the Everest and a creative mind, always in a good mood.”
— Javier Poves, team member