Case study
My Money Vibe with Santander
September 4, 2026
Product Manager & Sustainability Lead
Santander wanted to know whether a digital financial coach, working alongside a branch presence, could improve customers' financial confidence and loyalty. Life Moments set out to test this idea and provide hard data to back up our findings, with an OKR aligned pilot that launched in April 2026.
My Money Vibe (MMV) is a standalone web application, linked to from the Santander website, that helps customers with everyday money matters: financial resilience, long-term planning, pensions, university costs for children, and buying a home or downsizing. Through tools, quizzes, videos and checklists, it helps users understand their financial health and plan for the moments in life that matter to them. Santander tested this with a subset of its digital customer base, and separately piloted it in a selection of branches to support colleagues' conversations with customers.
Over seven iterative phases, the pilot showed a confirmed rise in customers' self-reported confidence, a strong loyalty signal in a high Net Promoter Score, and a consistent pattern of improvement driven by data rather than guesswork.
Four findings stand out.
Getting onboarding right came first
MMV launched with an onboarding journey asking a great deal upfront, benchmarking users' confidence and mapping them against an industry-standard segmentation model. Branch feedback, backed by the data, showed this was too much too soon, without a clear enough explanation of what users would get in return. Over seven fortnightly design sprints, working with the media agency, the journey was steadily refined: shorter questions, clearer copy, a smaller cookie-consent banner. Onboarding completion rose from around 15% of visitors in the pilot's first phase to 56% by its last.
Calling it a financial health check changed everything
Engagement and confidence built steadily throughout, but the sharpest improvement came once the framing of the Money Basics journey changed. Money Basics, comprising three short quizzes covering a user's current position, resilience and future outlook, is mandatory and as such the most visited part of the coach, though users choose when to complete it. Early on, too many were dropping out partway through. Working with the Santander team, the messaging was reworked around the plainer idea of a financial health check, and in-app promotion expanded from 10% to 40% of Santander's customer base. Completion rates improved markedly once users understood what they were signing up for. Around three-quarters of users who engaged with at least one tool reported feeling more confident, and NPS climbed from the high thirties early on to +62 most recently, comfortably alongside Santander's own best-performing digital channels. Commercial engagement moved as well: the share of onboarded users taking a meaningful commercial action rose from under 2% to around 15% over the same period.
The life moments users cared about most kept them coming back
The clearest pattern behind repeat use had nothing to do with the core coaching journey. Users who engaged with content built around a specific life event, downsizing, changing careers, caring, or costs around university and children, returned at several times the rate of everyone else. Money Basics performed well as a one-off but rarely brought people back on its own. The promise of a financial health check succeeded in bringing people in, however content that meets someone at a real moment in their life is what earns a second visit.
Continued success will need deeper integration
Some metrics were always going to be harder to move within the limits of a pilot. Much of the traffic arrived through social media, with users opening the coach and having no easy way back to it, so a strong return rate was never realistic without further work. That is solvable though: email capture at key points, paired with reminder emails, would give customers a way back in without the cost of deeper app integration.
Branch integration proved harder still, since colleagues are measured on commercial targets that MMV does not yet feed directly. The exception was a youth financial education session run with a Milton Keynes college. Every one of 48 students surveyed felt more confident afterwards and nine in ten would recommend it, a strong pointer for a more structured branch programme.
Three months in, the Santander My Money Vibe pilot has done what it set out to do: proven, with real customer data, that a digital financial coach can move the confidence and loyalty of the people who use it, through a genuinely iterative way of working that turned each phase's data into the next phase's improvement. Onboarding rose from 15% to 56%, confidence and NPS climbed steadily, and the sharpest gains came from plain language and content matched to real life events, not a bigger marketing spend. That combination, tested in a live banking environment, is now a template Life Moments can carry into how it builds and operates the coaching model elsewhere.
