The Financial Capability Lab

The Financial Capability Lab was a multi-year £2.5m programme – the biggest of its kind – from 2016 to 2022, designing and testing new ways to help people improve their money management skills.

The Lab, a partnership between the Money and Pensions Service (MaPS) and the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT), focused on three themes: helping people to build savings, get financial help, and manage their credit.

What did the Financial Capability Lab achieve?

The Lab was created to develop and test ideas based on insights from the behavioural sciences to help people improve their financial decisions. We created valuable new evidence on how to improve people’s financial capability by:

Generating 244 novel ideas for improving financial capability with the help of 90 experts.
Testing the most promising 17 ideas through online experiments on our Predictiv platform with more than 10,000 participants.
Further developing and rigorously testing a shortlist of ideas with a dozen companies and 130,000 participants.

How Can We Help

Whilst our work under the Financial Capability Lab has come to an end, we continue to work with the private and public sector as well as charities to apply behavioural insights to help people make good financial decisions. You can find out more about our work here. Please get in touch if you want to learn more.