As consumer-facing brands roll out augmented reality and virtual reality tools to improve the customer experience, financial services companies are just beginning to test their capabilities — with mixed results.

The technology already is influencing how customers approach furniture retail, as companies like Wayfair and Home Depot have demonstrated. Meanwhile, supply-chain logistics companies are examining its capacity to improve the order-picking process, and clothing retailers are deploying it to help customers get a better visual sense of how garments fit.

Financial fitness is the reason why MoneyLion rolled out an augmented-reality tool called Grow Your Stack nearly two years ago, using Apple’s ARKit technology. The objective was to give customers a visual representation of how their money is growing as a result of their good financial habits.

The company, however, decided to retire the tool after a year’s use. Chief product officer Tim Hong told Bank Innovation that, although Grow Your Stack offered customers new ways to visualize their financial situations, it didn’t generate actionable recommendations. The lessons learned made the company refocus its efforts on a revamped, comprehensive financial dashboard called The Financial Heartbeat, which it rolled out in March.

“Grow Your Stack was an engaging way to look at your finances, and certainly we’ve had hundreds of thousands of people view their stack,” Hong said. “It was more fun than something that was truly measurable and navigable.”

MoneyLion isn’t alone among the field of financial companies dabbling in AR and VR technology to offer visual representations of customers’ financial health or to assist in the purchasing process for financial products. USAA last fall rolled out an AR-enabled car buying tool (a pilot it discontinued after a couple of months), and Intuit has experimented with visualizing a customer’s finances as a forest, but experience has shown that customers still perhaps aren’t yet ready to use the technology to influence how they buy financial products.

“It is hard, especially in consumer finance, to get your customer to change their ways, to break their routines, to add new apps or do something new,” said John Caruso, chief creative officer of digital marketing and experience design agency MCD Partners. “There are many applications that make sense, but getting the AR and VR experiences right for the customer is going to take some time.”

For MoneyLion’s part, Hong said the interactions the company was able to generate through Grow Your Stack taught it that customers wanted a hands-on way to take action on their financial situations. Those lessons were folded into the core aspects of Financial Heartbeat, a visual representation of a beating heart that changes colors to reflect progress on a customers’ journey to financial health.

Despite the limitations, Hong is still bullish on AR and VR’s potential. “We value the engagement and the conversation we can have as we guide people through their financial journey, and tools like AR and VR help us engage [with customers],” he said. “I think we are scratching the surface of how we might do that in the future.”