Where knowledge is money

Schofield: Users benefit from tailored content and gain knowledge based on their preferences and interests

The thinking behind lovemoney.com is “empowering users through knowledge”, says Charlie Schofield, technology director at the money management site. Its personalised approach puts knowledge at the fingertips of its online community, and the company has a clear internal and external knowledge management strategy.

“Knowledge management is about people and interaction and not processes and unread documentation. We try to translate our internal approach to our online community,” says Schofield.

US-owned money information site The Motley Fool sold off its UK consumer site lovemoney.com this year by means of a management and staff buy-out. The company is young but it already has more than one million email subscribers.

“We are focusing on personalised finance and have a unique proposition in offering a personalised social platform as we quickly realised at The Motley Fool that the community aspect to personal finance is key. Creating a social network of like-minded people who share knowledge and empowering the individual to make the best decision will take personal finance to the next level,” says Schofield.

The company has three consumer strategies that can exist independently but are connected to the personal social platform. The valuable content and messaging strategy is based on expert opinion, real-time updates and up to five videos per week. Product selection and provision uses comparison and service engines and online banking capability gives registered users full account aggregation so their entire financial life is in one place.

Empowering users with knowledge is key to all three strategies. To develop the product selection strategy further, for example, Schofield is using technology to remove the need to interact with brokers.

“The online broker industry is based on lead submission, where information from a potential customer is funnelled into a form and a broker calls you back. A lead can be fired out to many brokers who may follow up. This is not in keeping with lovemoney.com’s ethos to provide transparency of information and a good user experience,” says Schofield.

Instead, the site aims to filter products to users with negligible data entry and give them the choice of talking to a broker or not. A new mortgage engine, for example, will put a user’s case management online.

“All the details pertaining to an individual’s application will be in an online repository, allowing a user and an adviser to access it at the same time, which will help streamline mortgage applications,” says Schofield.

The third facet of the consumer strategy, amalgamating all account details and integrating social ingredients, offers exciting possibilities, says Schofield.

“Comprehensive account information combined with peer knowledge can be used to create new applications such as financial goals, where users can benchmark themselves against other community members, so they gain knowledge about whether or not they are managing their money well,” says Schofield.

The ongoing development of imaginative applications is only possible through being able to work collaboratively, transparently and at speed so knowledge is easily disseminated and built on to deliver what the user wants.

“Lovemoney.com is a very agile organisation and our philosophy is to get things done through people and interactions rather than by formal procedures. We need to get features out onto our site and we have two-weekly agile development iterations based on agreed deliverables,” says Schofield.

To meet the tight time frame of a new release every fortnight, collaboration among project delivery teams is facilitated by Basecamp, a web-based project collaboration tool from 37signals, which offers wiki-style web-based text documents, file sharing and messaging. Teams also use Google spreadsheets and meet daily.

“Our employee mantra is collaboration and delivery. We are geared around working together for effective delivery and we use technology to share knowledge and enable conversations. After we have tested applications, we push them out the door and tell users about developments through our blog,” says Schofield.

Developers and designers work with a project sponsor who has to attend daily meetings to ensure problems are solved as soon as they arise. Collaboration technologies allow teams to be geographically dispersed.

“The developer of our car insurance engine is based in Brazil. The team used Google spreadsheets, Skype and instant messaging to share knowledge. Using collaborative technologies means we can access talent outside our Soho headquarters,” says Schofield.