Case study
Investment Coach: Making investing more personal
September 4, 2026
Head of Money Coach Academy & Marketing Lead
About two years ago, Life Moments entered an innovation competition run by interactive investor. We had an idea: what if money coaching could make investing feel more relevant to the individual?
With interactive investor, we didn’t have to start from scratch. They already had a wealth of strong investment content. But, the challenge was to help each customer find the content that was actually relevant to them.
Financial services has traditionally started with the product, the information or the segment, then tried to find the right customer for it. We wanted to flip that around. Start with the person. Understand what matters to them and be helpful first. Then, use what you learn to create a more relevant experience.
That competition idea quickly became a prototype, moved into user testing and ultimately became a live product: Investment Coach.
Starting with the person
As an experience-led business, we wanted to create something that customers actually wanted to use. We built the experience around education, coaching, personalisation and gamification, while supporting interactive investor's goals of increasing engagement and building a richer understanding of its customers.
A short quiz helps identify a customer's investor persona. From there, the experience narrows down what could otherwise be an overwhelming world of information into more relevant next best actions, content and polls.
But that’s not the most interesting part. What offers us the most behavioural insight is that customers don't have to accept the persona they're given.
They can switch and explore other personas. Experiment with different levels of confidence, knowledge and appetite. That gives the customer agency over their own personalisation, rather than making personalisation something that simply happens to them. It is a small design decision, but an important one. Customers who choose to change how they’ve been categorised are twice as active as those who don’t. Giving people a say in their own personalisation makes a difference.
The polls have created another feedback loop. They aren't simply there to make the experience more engaging. Customer responses can inform new stories and content, which in turn refreshes the experience. In other words, customers are part of shaping the content agenda themselves.
Relevance earns insight
There's a broader principle behind all of this. At Life Moments, we often talk about reversing the traditional industry model. Be helpful, gather data, segment, and then, target. Not the other way around.
When customers interact with something because it is genuinely useful, the organisation can learn more about what they need. Better understanding creates better personalisation. Better personalisation creates more reasons to engage. It becomes a virtuous cycle, rather than a data-gathering exercise in (not so effective) disguise.
This cycle becomes particularly powerful when the insight spans more than one experience. Investment Coach has now been integrated with interactive investor's wider data environment, allowing the insight it generates to create value more broadly across the business.
The same product is also beginning to perform two very different jobs. Within the secure site, the fuller experience can support deeper engagement and loyalty. On the public website, a smaller version of Investment Coach can support lead generation.
This means that Investment Coach, as one product, has two use cases, both contributing to an increasingly joined-up understanding of the customer.
Innovation continues
The opportunity is no longer just about helping someone discover more relevant investment content.
Could the experience move towards supporting an advice fact-find? Could AI create new ways for customers to interact with their Investment Coach? And as Targeted Support develops, could firms use this richer understanding of customers to provide more specific, genuinely helpful support at the moments it matters?
These shouldn't be separate innovations bolted onto the customer journey one by one.
The bigger opportunity is to think of digital coaching, human coaching, AI and emerging forms of support as one connected system, built around the customer rather than the industry's traditional product boundaries.
And perhaps that's the most interesting part of this story. What started as an idea in an innovation competition has grown into a live product with more than one role to play. And as we learn more about what customers need and how they want to engage, the opportunity for Investment Coach keeps growing with them.
