Skip to main content
This client decided to take steps to alter how their front-line staff feel about financial crime and their ability to help prevent it happening. Through taking a behavioural science-led approach, the video solution we created helped grow a more emotional connection to how financial crime can affect society at large, and to emphasise how their everyday work does make a difference.
Netherlands headquartered, providing services globally
Banking and financial services
60,000+
Financial economic crime has a huge cost to society and its victims. But for people working in banks, it can be hard sometimes to see how what you do has any bearing on preventing this happening.
As part of its drive to grow and more involved risk culture, ING / this bank wanted to create videos that quickly and effectively changed how its employees view financial crime – to stop it being seen as something distant, remote, “over there”, and furthermore, to counteract the view that it was something “other people” prevent happening.
We quickly realised that we need to help colleagues make an emotional connection to fighting financial economic crime.
Having dug a little deeper into employees testimonies, we identified that there was a psychological distance at play – many of them felt far removed from the consequences of financial crime and had no sense of how their customer checks could make any difference.
We also looked at how shock is often a tactic intuitively used to try and grab attention. However, the research shows us that there is no clear evidence that it actually has a meaningful impact on behaviour change. It seems that campaigns which rely on fear can lead to people feeling disempowered and overwhelmed, making change less likely. Research also shows that using shock tactics to grab attention can lead to people feeling overwhelmed, making behaviour change less likely.
With that in mind, our design ideas started from a place of making sure what we created was both emotional and relatable and also highlighted capability.
In the end we produced two videos.
In Video 1, we depicted three common scenes of everyday life. In each scene, something important in the scene suddenly vanishes into thin air while the narrator describes the true societal cost of financial crime and how it affects us all.
In Video 2, an in-house expert is interviewed behind the scenes of Video 1. She provides deeper insight into the topic and talks about how, and what, employee actions do help combat financial crime.
Following the research we had done, we deployed three key tactics:
Emotion – we showed everyday people being affected and looked to elicit a strong and immediate emotional response, something we know has a much bigger effect on behaviour change than shock tactics.
Relatability – we portrayed common life situations and how the impact is at your door, as we know people can swayed from action when they feel too far removed from the outcome, and greater geographical and social distance can distort our ability to empathise.
Capability – we showed how employees can make, and already are making, a difference through the customer checks they are asked to do every day.
The videos created a big splash across the organisation, increasing internal dialogue around the topic as well as sign ups for financial crime learning. The client has also now declared its intention to use a BeSci-led approach on more projects going forwards.
We'd love to explore the potential for behavioural science to inspire positive change within your organisation.
