Financial Needs Discovery

Financial Needs Discovery

Most financial conversations  surface symptoms before causes. This simulation trains representatives to identify income volatility, financial vulnerability, and decision drivers before discussing solutions.  

Audience: Financial services leaders, L&D managers, and hiring managers evaluating instructional designers for roles focused on performance enablement, sales effectiveness, and client-facing behavior change.

Constraints: The experience must communicate the business problem within seconds, without reliance on the simulation interface. It balances emotional realism (income instability, client skepticism) with professional credibility, avoiding a promotional tone while remaining enterprise-appropriate.

Task: Design an AI-driven simulation where learners conduct a consultative discovery conversation with a skeptical, variable-income client. Progression is gated by behavior: meaningful financial risk is only revealed after the learner asks relevant, context-driven questions about work structure and income variability.

Tone: Professional, grounded, and slightly urgent. Reflects real client tension and decision pressure without exaggeration.

Delivery: AI-driven simulation (devlin.ai) with behavior-based progression, conditional risk disclosure, and outcome-based feedback.

Design Rationale: 

Risk is gated behind the agent in training's own questions, not the script. A client who volunteers their vulnerability tests memorization, not discovery skill. The skepticism is real friction, not a cooperative training partner. The behavior being measured is asking the right question at the right time before being told the answer, which surfaces only under some resistance.

Financial Foundation Builder- Client-Facing App

Most families don't know their coverage gap until it's too late. This app surfaces it in less than 10 minutes.

Audience: Financial services clients, community-based financial education participants, and L&D managers evaluating instructional designers for roles focused on behavior-change tools, client-facing application development, and performance support design.

Constraints: The experience had to function as a standalone tool outside of any advisor-mediated delivery context, with zero barriers to entry. No login. No download. No data stored. 100% anonymous. The output had to communicate structural financial risk clearly enough to move a client toward a discovery conversation without tipping into a promotional or sales-forward tone.

Task: Design and deploy a client-facing web application that guides users through a structured financial gap assessment using the DIME method (Debt, Income, Mortgage, Education). The app generates a personalized gap calculation based on their household inputs, and surfaces a full report with gap analysis that includes autonomous recommendations per user.

Tone: Accessible, grounded, and direct. Reflects real financial tension without alarm or promotional framing.

Delivery: Claude Haiku-powered web application deployed on Netlify, featuring a Structural Gap Assessment, input based result generation, and a Care Connection referral mechanism through TypeForm.

Design Rationale: 

Anonymity for this app is intentional for user transparency and trust. Finances can be a source of anxiety for fear of judgement. Therefore, the app has no login or data stored. The purpose is to inform the user of financial gaps for family security, not to generate sales leads or push prepackaged financial products. At the conclusion of the personalized gap calculation report, the user may choose to schedule an appointment to close the revealed gaps, or complete the Care Connection for a referral.