Reducing stress-driven money mistakes using large-scale consumer experiments

Financial stress drives some of the costliest decisions people make, yet workplace wellness programs almost never address money. Money Guided was building an employee benefits product to close that gap and asked us to ground it in evidence on both audiences at once: the HR managers who buy it and the employees who use it.

We reviewed 50+ studies on financial wellbeing and fintech adoption, then surveyed 533 UK employees and 264 HR managers, with in-depth interviews of senior HR leaders across pharma, retail, financial services, and professional services. A 400-participant controlled experiment tested four framings of the product's value, wellness-led, finance-led, hybrid, and competitor-style, against a control, using validated wellbeing scales.

The analysis surfaced subjective wealth, how wealthy people feel rather than what they earn, as the dimension that best predicts financial confidence, attention, and stress. We built five behavioral profiles on these findings, two for end users and three for HR buyers, and translated them into product features, wireframes, high-fidelity mockups, and a messaging strategy designed to promote future-oriented financial decisions.

Five profiles built from more than 1,200 primary data points now underpin the product: the features we specified were integrated into Money Guided's MVP, and the winning experimental frame shaped how the product presents its value to both employees and the HR managers who buy it. This is design validation, measured before launch; in-product behavioral outcomes are the next test.