Older adults sometimes request or require assistance with financial management tasks from close family or friends, and many of these tasks are now being completed online. Due to a lack of better mechanisms for granting a delegate access to their bank accounts, older adults commonly share their online banking passwords with their close others, opening the older adult up to a greater risk of financial abuse or other security or privacy violations. Through my research, I have explored the impact and value of two techniques for mitigating these risks: behavioural nudges and proxy accounts. The former are interface elements that guide the user without limiting their agency, and the latter is an access mechanism that provides accountability for, and limitations on, the account data and financial actions available to a delegate.

To investigate these techniques I designed and implemented a high-fidelity online banking prototype and used it to run a user study (n=21) in which older adults and close others were asked to perform a series of tasks in the prototype before discussing their perceptions of both the proxy accounts and nudges. Overall, my findings suggest that both older adults and close others greatly approve of the implementation of proxy accounts as this mechanism provides increased transparency, accountability, and legitimacy for the activities of close other delegates. Attitudes towards behavioural nudges were more neutral on average, with a wide range of opinions on their efficacy and desirability, but the findings also indicate that there is more work that can be done to investigate their efficacy in other contexts.

Additionally I have identified a number of factors that should be considered when designing online banking systems to support delegation, with the goal of minimizing risk to older adults while still maintaining their agency and the level of support available to them. These findings, extensive literature review and synthesis, and my own design process were used to propose a design space for considering access mechanism and designing behavioural nudges in delegated banking contexts.