The Personal Property Securities Register (PPSR) supports the growth of Australia’s economy. The PPSR allows Australian businesses to safeguard their security interests (money owed to them) and make informed commercial decisions. Businesses can register on the PPSR by completing an online form hosted by the Australian Financial Security Authority (AFSA).
For a PPSR registration to be effective, businesses must provide details about themselves, the assets they are registering, and the other party in the transaction. BETA’s previous research indicated some less experienced users get some of these details incorrect. This is a problem because even a small mistake can render the registration invalid.
To help PPSR users make fewer mistakes, AFSA implemented a number of enhancements to the PPSR. BETA tested two of these enhancements using randomised controlled trials:
A redesigned review screen
To prevent users from rushing through the registration, and to highlight the importance of registering correctly, a pop-up has been added at the final review screen and required users to confirm the details they inputted.
The new review screen did not reduce incorrect transactions. This may be because people who made incorrect registrations did not realise they were incorrect – and so asking them to confirm the accuracy of their registration had no effect.
New layout and prompts
To prevent users from making mistakes, questions were presented in a more straightforward way and added five prompts that appeared if a common mistake was made. For example, if people entered details for a business that was no longer active, they were shown a prompt that explained the business was no longer active and that asked users to review their application.
Changing the layout and adding prompts almost halved the number of incorrect transactions from 22.3% to 12.8%.
AFSA is now planning to adopt the prompts as its business-as-usual practice. More generally, these results shed light on how government agencies can help less experienced users navigate complex registration processes.
You can access the full report here: Introducing behavioural insights to the Personal Property Securities Register.