The Next Frontier for Financial Services: Life-Cycle Event Platforms

While these embedded journeys are increasingly comprehensive, they currently revolve around the purchase of a single product or service. For example, planning a holiday can now be done in one flow—booking flights, hotels, public transport, car rental, and insurance. Similarly, buying a home can involve a streamlined process for property evaluation, mortgage arrangement, insurance, and the actual purchase.

However, life also includes a few significant, life-changing events that most people experience—each involving a chain of interlinked administrative services and product acquisitions. Currently, very few platforms offer an end-to-end experience for these complex milestones. This is the next layer of consolidation: integrating multiple smaller customer journeys into one overarching flow that guides users through these rare but impactful life events. Due to their complexity and the fact that people only go through them a few times in their lives, proper guidance is not a luxury but a necessity—to avoid costly mistakes or overlooked steps.

A platform that manages the full scope of such life-changing events—including coordination with government and institutional administration—would be extremely powerful.

Financial institutions are uniquely positioned to play this role as life-cycle event managers, because they:

• Have large customer bases with frequent digital engagement (e.g. through mobile apps).
• Are already seen as trusted advisors — critical when dealing with sensitive personal data.
• Are involved in many financial and administrative aspects of such life events.
• Hold verified customer data through KYC/AML processes that can be reused.

Offering a seamless, end-to-end experience brings tremendous value to customers. Many would be willing to pay for the assurance that their life event is managed properly and efficiently. For banks, it increases customer stickiness and creates strong cross- and upsell opportunities.

So, which life events could banks help manage? Here are some key milestones:

• Birth of a Child
• Wedding
• Divorce
• Buying a House
• Home Move
• Child Going to College
• Buying a Car
• Death of a Close Relative

The platform could present users with a list of key life milestones to choose from. Once a milestone is selected, a guided wizard or checklist would appear, helping the user navigate a structured sequence of steps. The interface should clearly indicate which tasks are completed, in progress, or still pending.

For each step, the bank should aim to provide a fully integrated and automated experience. However, if this isn’t feasible—due to technical limitations or timing constraints—it should offer alternatives. These could include generating a document (e.g. a PDF) for use with third parties, handling certain steps manually within the bank, or simply providing the necessary information such as explanations, contact details, or relevant links.

Let’s now explore a few life-cycle events to illustrate how this could work in practice:

Birth of a child

• Declaration to government (before birth if unmarried and/or after birth)
• Notification of fiscal authority and employer
• Administrative requests, e.g. child benefits, birth allowance, health fund, paternity leave, maternity leave…​
• Creating a birth list for friends and family
• Designing and sending a birth card (including address list management)
  Note: This address list could be reused for other journeys or for managing banking contacts.
• Sending thank-you cards to people who contributed to the birth list
• Setting up and decorating the nursery
• Hospital arrangements (e.g. payments, insurance coordination)
• Support with choosing a name
• Financial products and services: update family insurance, add the child to hospital insurance, review birth-related reimbursements from hospital insurance, open savings accounts or plans for the child, update inheritance beneficiaries, etc.
• …​

Wedding

• Wedding List
• Wedding Venue, reception, catering, party (e.g. DJ)
• Wedding Flowers
• Wedding Attire (e.g. dress) and Rings
• Wedding Photographer
• Wedding Transport & Accommodation
• Wedding Hairdresser, Make-up, Pedicure, Manicure…​
• Arrangements with government for administrative impact, but also for the ceremony
• Coordination with religious institutions
• Notification to fiscal authority and employer regarding fiscal impact
• Notification of civil status change to companies (banks, telecoms, utilities, etc.)
• Wedding invitations and guest list management
• Thank-you notes
• Honeymoon planning
• Financial products and services: update insurance, inheritance beneficiaries, run tax simulations, use budget management tools