Referreport
Very few people like to talk about retirement planning. Sparkasse is now launching a campaign together with Neue Leben insurance to approach the topic in a more playful way. From the digital agency Curious Company The companies have had an AI chatbot developed. What’s special about it is that the bot looks like the customer themselves – just in a senior citizen version. You can talk to your future self via a website and at special terminals that are located in 40 Sparkasse branches. The pensioner avatar then answers users’ questions about retirement planning. This will be possible both in the branch and in the browser until at least the end of November 2024. But what exactly is behind it?
Creative advertising campaign for savings banks
The chatbot is easy to try out: On the website Meetyourfuture.de click on “Start call to the future”, select your current age and then have a picture taken of yourself. The service then creates an aged version of you that you can contact via the website. A chat opens in which the future self tells us about how his current life is going. In a quick check, the chatbot told us about his vacations (it’s boring on Mars, he prefers to go to the mountains), his condo (of course with a flying taxi landing pad on the solar deck) and where this beautiful life in the future comes from. “But what is REALLY important: take care of your money. Honestly. Almost no matter how, the main thing is that you take care of it and ask experts,” says the future self. Below that, the chatbot places this linkIf you click on it, you will find a page with information about pensions – and many links to book a consultation with Sparkasse. The new chatbot is therefore a creative campaign by Sparkasse to get more people to buy pension products there.
This is what you should keep in mind when dealing with bank advisors
However, these products are often more expensive than if you take care of your retirement provision yourself – for example by buying ETFs. Especially if high costs are incurred over several decades, this can eat into the return. The pension may then be lower than expected. Anyone who seeks advice from a bank should never blindly trust the statements of their interlocutors. Read the legally required cost information and product information sheets carefully. Critically question what the bank employees tell you. Although they often talk about “bank advisors”, which sounds neutral. But the dilemma of bank employees is that they are also salespeople and are more likely to offer products that are also good for the bank – because they bring in their money. In 2021, the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin) sent test customers to bank branches for advice for the first time and also asked serious deficiencies in advice firmly.
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Source: German