Accenture Technology Labs has partnered with our Financial Services (Capital Markets/Wealth & Asset Management) group to develop the Accenture Health and Wealth Visualization Tool, a graphical system that helps people manage the trade-offs inherent in retirement planning. To save space, I'm going to call it HWVT.

With HWVT, you trade off your house against your car against your charitable contributions against your legacy (inheritance) against your health care. Increasing the amount of money dedicated to one reduces the amount of money available for the others. This is shown primarily via pictures--as you adjust your house from trailer up to mansion, for example, your car might go from "Maserati" to "Mini" and your legacy from "Multi-Million Dollar Annuity" to "The Gomer Pyle DVD Treasury." The pictures are supplemented by a spreadsheet, so when it's time to get down to brass tacks, you've got the necessary information. (The proprietary What People Like You Have Done analytics behind HWVT, by the way, is both utterly absorbing and beyond the scope of this article.)

So What?

It's actually almost fun--more like playing a game than balancing your budget. And while you're having fun, you're learning something important about trade-offs. Mainly, you're learning that there are trade-offs, which a lot of people don't seem to appreciate (witness the comic-if-it-weren't-so-tragic level of credit card debt we've amassed in this country).

The goal is to use HWVT as an on-boarding tool for banks and other institutions that sell retirement vehicles. The system would gently introduce a prospective customer to the concept of trade-offs, thus preparing him or her for a discussion with a sales associate. Note the benefit: The associate saves time and thus (presumably) enjoys more customer contacts and higher sales.

All very tidy, but they're missing a bet. Retirement planning is something that older people (who should have worried about it years ago) tend to focus on. But the real bonanza comes from getting young people to look at the long term and invest their money with you rather than frittering it away on food and shelter. How could you achieve this?

Imagine an XBox Live game called something like "MoneyMaw" which illustrates the perils of poor money management. Its Inflation Wolves would chew up your pathetic savings account (1 per cent per year, oh yeah!) leaving you with negative real returns. Then the Premium Coffee Gremlins would ravage it further ($4 times 365 times 40 years = $58,400). Finally, Gaz Guzzlers would infect the SUV your parents gave you and do a number on both your wallet and your environmental street cred. A grim situation. How do you dig yourself out? Easy: Clean up your act...and give all your remaining fundage to the friendly animated investment counselor who wants to be your trusted, lifelong friend. Congratulations! You win!

For more information on Accenture Health and Wealth Visualization Tool, please get in touch with Accenture Technology Labs' Craig Gettelman (craig.a.gettelman@accenture.com).