The Challenge:

 first direct was the original ‘challenger’ in the UK banking category – arriving on to the scene in 1989 to take on the absurdities of traditional banking.

 Armed with radical common sense, it made its mark by launching a bank unlike anything else on the high street.  A bank that never closed, that had real people answering the phone 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and that truly put its customers financial and emotional wellbeing first.

 But thirty years on, in a world that has changed and a market that has been disrupted by the rise of a new breed of digital start-ups, the brand had lost its voice.

 Once the challenger, now the challenged.  It was time to show the nation once more the true value and cultural importance of a bank that puts its customers’ wellbeing at the heart of everything it does.

 The Solution:

 Despite the wealth of innovation that has come out of the fintech revolution to empower the customer, money remains one of the UK’s greatest sources of anxiety.  Empowerment alone is not enough to help customers to feel financially confident.

 Digging deeper into this disconnect helped us to unlock a key insight: the UK doesn’t have a healthy relationship with money.  Money is a wellness issue that we rarely think about in wellness terms. 

 Responding to this cultural tension we worked with first direct to launch the money wellness revolution – a platform championing the importance of financial confidence to our everyday emotional wellbeing and highlighting that money is a wellness issue.

To kick off, we launched the Money Wellness Index – the first-ever benchmark measuring the state of the nation’s relationship with money. A study that will run annually, the index aims to highlight the impact of money on our overall wellness, exposing the issue and getting the nation talking about money as a wellness issue and provide a long term barometer for the nation’s financial wellbeing

Informed by the findings of the index, our #moneywellness campaign gets to the heart of people’s relationships with money – a new creative expression of first direct’s enduring commitment to do right by its customers. It challenges the limiting beliefs that hold so many of us back from having a healthy relationship with money: the belief that we’re doing it wrong, that other people are better with money than us, or that we’re defined by how much we have.

Running across digital, press, social and outdoor, #moneywellness marks the first chapter in our journey to open up a more positive and empowered way of thinking about money.

 Welcome to the Money Wellness Revolution. We’re only just getting started.