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1 in 5 Americans is excluded from formal credit
13% of Americans are underbanked (having a bank account but regularly using alternative financial services), and 5% are unbanked (not having a bank account). Operating outside of formal banking institutions excludes people from formal access to credit, which impacts professional, housing, and savings opportunities.
Solution
An informal e-banking platform
How
Ethnographic Research
Iterative Prototyping
Web development
Who
Myself, supervised by
two senior researchers
and designers
There is an opportunity to help people save and access credit outside of formal institutions.
Background
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Institutional efforts to include more people in formal banking systems have failed.
·
Established informal banking practices vary widely across cultures
·
Mainstream American culture does not benefit from a long cultural history of informal banking practices.
How might we create an innovative solution?
Human-centered design allows us to put people at the center of the design process.
You cannot ask people about the choices they make and why they make them. We make thousands of choices each day, most of which are on "autopilot": these are what we call ingrained patterns. Ingrained patterns are predictable and remain stable over time. Innovation can't be based on user needs, because they are going to change. Revealing ingrained patterns is a way to understand what really motivates people.
We used objective hermeneutics, a mix of sociological and anthropological methods, to collect and analyze data about people's ingrained patterns.
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Research
We delineated behavioral dimensions related to finances, the individual, social network, and technology usage
We conducted storytelling sessions of 2 hours each with 20 subjects representing the target market population, to identify individuals at the extremes of the behavioral dimensions.
We observed people in their real lives after the storytelling sessions, to create falsifiable hypotheses on their ingrained patterns.
These are 2 of the 6 behavioral types we identified, representing the market for a financial inclusion process for underbanked and unbanked people in the US.
We built an inventory of 50+ customer needs and possible solutions for each need, and modeled the likelihood of adoption for a specific project to prioritize features.
Design
CICO aligns with the Sustainer, Resolver, Optimizer, and Stabilizer behavioral types​, in this order. This means that a feature list that aligns with the ingrained patterns of these behavioral types will increase the likelihood of CICO adoption
Prioritized Feature: Flexible Payment
Use Case:
Lendees can record payments in different modalities (checks, ACH, cash, venmo/zelle) and in any quantity (allows for micropayments or paying a loan in full at any time).​
Why this feature:
This feature aligns with the ingrained patterns of conservation, flexible systems, allowance, ad hocery.
Prioritized Feature: Interest saved-to-date vs. current market rates for US bank loans
Use Case:
Lendees are able to see how much more they would be paying in interest if they loaned the same amount of money from a bank, based on the latest interest rates for personal loans in the US.​
Why this feature:
This feature aligns with the ingrained patterns of independence from institutions, non-conformity
Prioritized Feature: Dynamic Amortization Table
Use Case:
Lendees are able to receive guidance but do not need to stick to the schedule generated by the table — the amortization table updates based on user payment frequency.
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Why this feature:
This feature aligns with the ingrained patterns of flexible systems, allowance, conservation
I developed a usable prototype for CICO, in the form of a web application, using HTML/CSS/Javascript, Keycloack for security and authorization, and MySQL for data management, which TOCA is currently deploying to test the concept of CICO with a group of users.
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Development
