Where is the data? Analyzing customer footprints for better product design

by guest blogger Jacobo Menajovsky, Senior Data Analyst – Grameen Foundation / @jj_menajovsky

These are my daughter’s old shoes.

We just took them out of the closet to pass them on to her younger brother who’s recently started walking, but when I took a closer look at them, I wondered if their best days weren’t behind them. Call me crazy, but I immediately started decoding all the signs and indicators of their usage. Yes, to me, data is everywhere.

We are constantly gathering, interpreting and acting on data. Think about it. Every time you walk into a new situation, your “decision support system” starts to process past data to help you adjust to the new experience. Your brain is actually modeling those signs and symbols (data), building connections and classifying them into categories.

What if you wanted to understand how these shoes were used? Do you think you could reconstruct the past simply by looking at them? There are lots of signs and indicators: a broken ankle wrap, a heavily-rubbed toe cap, and many holes.

Now let’s move from data gathering to data modeling. When we put all this data to work we can build a great profile of how the shoes have been used. It looks like they went through a lot of kicking and dragging, and plenty of crawling.  If you look at the soles, though you’ll see that they’re unworn. So, it seems the upper parts of the shoes were used more than their bottoms. This observation might even give you a few ideas about how to improve shoes like these and make them more durable. This is exactly what we call improving your product using customer footprints. In this case, the footprints are literal!

As a data scientist and microfinance practitioner, I am always searching for signals and indicators that show how poor people are using products and services. I believe the best way to understand their behavior is by analyzing their footprints. This data can come to me in various formats (e.g. digitally or on paper) and platforms.  I often have to put in a lot of work before I begin analysis, but if done correctly, it gives me a lot in return.

In an ideal world, records would have unique customer IDs and information about the products that each uses as well as past transactions. If you are really lucky you may also have some socio-demographic information like age, gender, rural/urban indicator, branch or location, household composition, family size, and poverty level.

The more data the better.   Your data set can help you answer some key business questions: What’s the penetration of product A at different locations? Is this affected by poverty level or household composition? What about understanding our customers’ lifecycle? Do we see differences in outstanding balances at different customers’ tenures? Our recent study on implementing data analytics provides an exhaustive list of business questions and analytic approaches.

At Grameen Foundation we are working towards helping pro-poor organizations crunch their numbers, understand their customers better, and make more informed decisions. We are also refining our data collection process, using the right set of mobile data collections tools and state of the art analytics to better understand the challenges and needs of the poorest. After all, it’s only by gaining better insights that we will contribute to the development of more tailored products and services – from baby shoes to microfinance products– and that’s essential if we want to improve the lives of the most vulnerable people in our planet.

Mobile payment in India: learning from M-Pesa

Researchers at the Indian Center for Micro Finance have turned to work on Kenya's M-Pesa in an effort to understand how similar payment schemes might be implemented in India. In a recent article, IMTFI fellow Deepti Kc and IFMR programme head Mudita Tiwari asked what lessons can be taken from the vast amount of work that has already accumulated on Kenya's M-Pesa scheme and how they can help India's emerging mobile payments system.

Despite initiatives by a number of different partners, the researchers describe the uptake of mobile payment technology among the low-income population of India, as "cautious". Over- regulation, mobile companies targeting the rich and the need for internet based transactions are given as reasons for the lack of a strong client base among India's poor.

Nonetheless they are optimistic that lessons can be taken from Kenya's M-Pesa to tap into this market. They suggest that client protection and regulation that ensures profitability are key. They also believe a dedicated fund from the Reserve Bank of India should be created in order to promote the use of mobile payments among low-income clients and incentivize private partners to develop platforms to reach them.

frog about town

IMTFI researcher Jan Chipchase's work has been featured all around the web in the past month.

Chipchase and the team at frog were also interviewed for a recent Atlantic article on banking in Afghanistan. The interview draws on Chipchase's new publication with Mark Rolston, Carla Silver, and Joshua Blumenstock at frog design brings their skills photographic and ethnographic documentarians to bear on financial services, particularly savings, in Afghanistan. Their report is called In the Hands of God, and it's both lovely and thoughtful.

Chipchase,  Rolston, and Silver also recently wrote about their work on CGAP and for Core 77. Their series for Core 77 focuses not only on their findings but also provides a window into their experiences in the field. It is particularly worth a look for industry professionals and researchers alike. Here, they write on risk mitigation in the field, gender and research in Afghanistan, the experience of conducting this kind of research, and managing their expectations. They have not one but two excellent posts on conducting life-changing research in rural places.

Situating Financial Decisions

by guest blogger Ignacio Mas

A job waiting to be "hired." Photo courtesy of Ignacio Mas.

Understanding customers’ purchase decisions is the core of the marketing challenge. We know it’s about segmenting in order to get more granular customer insights, identifying customers’ alternatives in order to put a given product in a wider context, evaluating the needs and the benefits as well as the barriers to adoption. But all too often the analysis becomes mechanical, customer and product market lines are drawn rather arbitrarily, and it is all expressed in a cool technocratic language that customers themselves wouldn’t recognize.

In Finding the Right Job for Your Product, Clayton Christensen and his colleagues offer a very crisp approach to keeping the customer at the center of the analysis. Think of it as customers finding that they need to get a job done, and seeking which products or services to hire to do the job. It may appear to be a mere switching of words: "job to be done" rather than customer "needs" or "benefits;" "hiring products" rather than "buying." But consider some of the implications of the job-to-be-done mindset.

First, buying decisions are most often driven much more by the particularities of situations rather than by intrinsic customer characteristics. To use the milkshake example in the article referred to above, the job fulfilled by a milkshake sold at 8am on a Monday morning to bored commuters is not the same as that of a milkshake sold at 5pm on Saturday afternoon to the same person with kids in tow. It is more useful to segment by the circumstances of the situation (e.g. time of day, day of week) rather than by assumed customer socio-demographic factors.

Second, the range of alternatives that customers might consider for the job can be much broader than is usually recognized. To use another Christensen example, we should want children to "hire" school in order to help them feel a little bit successful every day. Indeed, teachers’ battle daily for their pupils’ attention and motivation; win that, and education follows. Looked at in this way, going to school competes with the local soccer club or even belonging to a gang.

Third, purchasing decisions are driven in part by the capacity of the product or service to fulfill the functional needs felt by the customer, but also by the emotional elements surrounding the decision, such as fear, decision fatigue, pride, or the desire to fit in. Christensen explains how IKEA is organized to do a particular job very well: “We need to furnish this apartment today!” What a powerful synthesis of functional and emotional needs. Injecting drama and emotion is much easier if we are cognizant of the situation, and not just of the nature of the characters involved.

Logical as all this is, applying the "job to be done" framework to finance may not be so straight-forward. Financial considerations seem to touch every aspect of living the desire for your children to lead a better life than you had, to minimize life’s daily hassles and humiliations, to feel like you are keeping up and fulfilling your obligations to kin and kith, to reduce the feeling of present or future dependency. And financial considerations stretch over time: Unlike the milkshake, they don’t appear in our lives momentarily. Breaking up the customer experience into situations may therefore seem artificial.

Still, the key situations may be those "moments of determination" when people decide to set money aside or borrow in order to try to beat what the future has in store for them. Through these determinations people gain a greater sense of control over events, whether of the daily, occasional or life-cycle kind, and need not be accompanied with any concrete expression of goals. These determination moments are hard to identify but an indirect way to access them might be to interview people at the moment when they are acting on the benefits of that determination, such as when they are at the shop to buy a new pair of shoes. It is then possible to work backwards to what got them there: how they developed that determination, what were the circumstances leading up to it, what jobs they felt they needed to get done, what they "hired" to get it done. That involves recall and we know the hazards of memory, but it is hard to make sense of people’s financial practices without putting things on some sort of timeline.

Much of both quantitative and qualitative client research is focused on classifying people (their income, education, prior financial history) and their living environment (their location, culture, available financial services). We may need to put more emphasis on a third element: classifying the situations in which they find themselves when they make financial decisions.

Ignacio Mas is an independent consultant on technology-enabled models for financial inclusion.

Psychological Barriers to Mobile Money Adoption among Poor Internal Migrants in India

IMTFI fellow Deepti Kc reports on IMTFI-sponsored research among rickshaw pullers in Delhi, India undertaken with Mani Nandhi.

Mobile banking is now a reality in a number of developing countries. Rather than the traditional branches, mobile money services in India use non-bank agents (also known as business correspondents) to facilitate financial transactions on behalf of banks. In cities like Delhi, India, where millions of poor migrants come from rural areas, such mobile banking services with nominal Know Your Customer (KYC) norms present an immense opportunity for reducing barriers to financial inclusion. Yet, the uptake among the poor of mobile banking services, especially of savings products, has not been encouraging. A number of mobile money professionals are increasingly looking into specific behavioral patterns that may illuminate why, despite the availability of low-cost and higher-security financial services, many of the poor continue to rely on expensive and high-risk methods of saving and credit (see, for instance, Mas 2012). Reflecting similar questions, in this post I highlight some preliminary observations on psychological barriers to mobile banking among rural migrant rickshaw pullers in Delhi. These observations have emerged through the course of the research project that Mani Nandhi and I are currently conducting in Delhi, India, with funding from IMTFI.

Rickshaw pullers fixing their bikes before starting their day in Delhi, India.

While the main barrier to financial inclusion of India’s rural migrants is unawareness of mobile banking and persistent culture of distrust of financial institutions, we found that, often other forms of psychological hurdles also act as barriers. For our research, we visited an illegal slum settlement inhabited by migrant pullers. Most of these pullers are involved in agricultural activities in their native villages and visit Delhi during off-season with a sole focus to maximize earnings during the migratory period.  Our study focused mainly on the mobilisation of those pullers with no identification cards so we could help them obtain government Unique Identification cards and link them to mobile services. As a first step of our study, we asked some pullers who already had an identification card and a mobile phone to use a mobile bank account to save. This was done to examine whether an initiative to promote savings using mobile banks can help these pullers to switch from informal to formal savings mechanisms. At the time of our meeting, all of these migrants were saving on a daily basis with their “tekedhar” (the rickshaw owner). This case study highlights psychological barriers that hindered the savings capacity with mobile banks of four migrant pullers.

Ready to work after a morning meal of rice.

"I am not a valuable customer." 

Since he first reached Delhi five years ago, Man Singh has tried multiple times to open a bank account. Even though he manages to save and remit money to his village through informal mechanisms (such as sending money with their friends and other fellow rickshaw pullers or the Hawala network), there are times when he cannot provide money when his family members urgently need it. He was earlier misled by an NGO staff member, who charged him to fill out the application form to open a bank account. To this day he has not been successful in opening an account, making him extremely cynical about mainstream financial institutions. At this point, he strongly believes that he is not a valuable customer and does not want to save with a bank where he is not valued. Despite our encouragement and information about mobile banking, he refused to come with us and open a mobile bank account.

"It is expensive to save with mobile banks."

Raja opened a mobile bank account because his friend opened one, yet, he does not see any benefits in saving with mobile money services when there is a cost for every transaction when saving is free with his tekedhar. Like Raja, most poor people are highly loss-averse, and this tendency can create reluctance to save with mobile banking. While mobile banking can provide a safer mechanism to save, one should also understand that informal saving mechanisms have their own inherent advantages, which appeal to the poor when conducting savings transactions.

"The mobile counter is not at a convenient location."

An enthusiastic rickshaw puller Bharat approached us to help him open a mobile bank account. He believes that he spends more when his money is easily accessible to him and believes if he keeps his money in the bank, he will be able to save more, as this will help him not spend on temptation goods such as alcohol and gambling. However, even though the mobile bank counter is around 2 km away from his place, for him the location of the counter is the problem, as he generally does not visit that area. Thus the location of the counter appeared as a potentially “real” cost for Bharat despite knowing the advantages of opening a bank account. This highlights that a sheer hassle such as the location of a service provider can rationally underlie the decision to be unbanked.

"I will open my bank account tomorrow instead of today."

Ram intends to visit a nearby mobile bank counter whenever we ask him. He does not think the mobile counter is far away or at a inconvenient location. In addition, he sees value in opening a bank account. However, no matter how much we insist, the day of the proposed visit, he is conflicted as he prefers to go to work and declines to come with us on that day, promising that he will visit the following day. As a matter of fact, this was the most common problem that we faced while getting these rickshaw pullers their bank accounts. The pullers who had earlier shown interest to open bank accounts simply refused to visit the nearby mobile counter.

Rickshaw pullers in their road-side tents.

These stories speak to common psychological barriers that the poor face when accessing formal savings institutions. Therefore, encouragement is needed to overcome these psychological barriers to saving through MM services. First, mobile bank agents should understand that when a client enters a counter, he/she may lack the necessary knowledge about the benefits of mobile money and, at the same time, he/she may be reluctant to join the new service based on a feeling that he/she could never be a valued customer. When such client enters the counter, it is important that agents guide them well, and explain the product properly. If agents do not value such customers and treat them with an abrasive attitude, this will further dissuade the unbanked from pursuing the mobile banking option.

Second, psychological barriers occur due to potential clients’ failure to see the value of the product or service. Thus, products must be designed to address the psychological constraints faced by the poor when accessing formal savings products. To increase uptake, products must have add-on features such as basic financial literacy about the products. More generally, as Jake Kendall recently suggested, mobile money service design must seek to simplify financial accounting interfaces in order to be accessible to a broader public. Mobile banking agents can play a role in raising awareness among the poor about disciplined saving practices and about the added security of mobile banking, which can provide better protection from from risk of theft and from temptation to spend money. In addition, agents should inform their clients about the interest that one can earn from formal savings—something that is not always possible in informal saving practices. Mobile banks can facilitate greater awareness campaigns in partnership with trusted local governance institutions regarding savings with formal institution, which can play a vital role in overcoming these psychological constraints that the  poor face.

Third, while saving with mobile banks is safer, the poor still turn to informal savings mechanisms because of their flexibility and accessibility. Formal savings products must therefore be designed and marketed in a way that accommodates savings preferences of the poor. Product enrollment procedures should be simpler, transparent and convenient. Finally, there might be value in encouraging mobile banks in India not just as a means to remit but also as a means to save.

Eleven Tips to Help Ensure that Your Mobile Financial Services Program Is Successful

In the following post, guest bloggers and researchers from the Grameen Foundation offer best practices for microfinance institutions operating mobile financial services programs.

While “mobile money” is a common term, the reality is that money programs vary across regions and between implementing partners, mobile money products are not all the same, and the clients who use them vary. That said, we have found a number of “dos” and “don’ts” that apply for all microfinance-related mobile financial services (MFS) programs. Microfinance institutions (MFIs) should consider the following tips as they roll out and tweak their mobile financial services programs.

1. Be prepared. As a general rule, business models are not easily transferable, because no two markets are identical. Therefore, before launching any services, MFIs should carry out all the necessary research, including a cost/benefit analysis, client-focused market research, assessments of internal structure, processes and IT capacities, business models and market environments. 
2. Communicate. It is just as important for an MFI to proactively communicate to their staff about strategy as it is for it to externally brand the new product and/or service. Without buy-in from the staff, especially loan officers, the chances of success are significantly reduced.
3. Establish a change-leadership plan. Implementing mobile financial services can have a significant effect on an organization’s internal structure and processes. Therefore, it is important to ensure that the new applications are fully understood by your staff as well as your clients. Staff may need to acquire and develop new skill sets.
4. Seek partnerships. Although it is possible for an MFI to develop mobile financial services from scratch, given the state of the MFS market today, it usually is easier and cheaper to seek partnership with a mobile network operator (MNO), a bank or third party. 
5. Test and monitor services. Because the MFS market is still relatively new, it is constantly changing, with new technologies and developments occurring every day. An MFI must regularly test and monitor its market environment and be prepared to make necessary changes to re-adjust their strategy.
6. Timing is key. An MFI should take its time in developing its MFS strategy in line with the market environment. However, once the decision is made and the business case exists, it should act decisively, to ensure that it doesn’t miss out on market opportunities as new, non-traditional entrants compete in the space.
7. Innovation is needed around products. As more MFIs offer repayment and disbursement services, and MFS becomes more commonplace, there is a need to be more creative about the use of the mobile phone for new product innovation to remain competitive.  This could involve bundling products, creating tools to increase savings, combining data sources for alternative credit scoring, or partnering with other channels, to name a few options.
8. Take a customer-centric approach. Mobile phones offer a unique opportunity to provide a tailored touch for clients and improve customer service.  Listening to customers can lead to keen insights on potential products or services. In addition, keep in mind that once adoption of mobile financial services takes place, customers begin to have higher expectations about services.
9. Develop an integrated system. An MFS that is integrated to an MFI’s management information system is crucial to the success of its implementation. Manual reconciliation should be avoided at all costs.
10. Develop or leverage an extensive agent footprint. Without a channel and well-designed distribution network, an MFS will only have a limited reach.
11. Collaborate with regulators. In addition to analyzing the regulatory environment, it is important to build relationships with regulators and provide them with insights about the market. Remember – mobile financial payments are still relatively new for most players, supervisory authorities included.

To learn more about Grameen Foundation’s Best Practices in Mobile Microfinance study and download the complete document, please visit http://www.grameenfoundation.org/resource/best-practices-mobile-microfinance. This study was supported by IMTFI.

Disclaimer: Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of IMTFI.

(updated--previous post contained broken link)

Starting a Conversation on Financial Inclusion and Design in China

Attending Reboot’s publication launch of "Embracing Informality: Designing Financial Services for China's Marginalized," February 28, 2013.

by Ivan V. Small

Panel Discussion on Designing for Financial Inclusion, from left to right: Nicole Stubbs CEO First Access; Patrick Ainslie, Reboot Embracing Informality co-author; Tricia Wang, Global Tech Ethnographer; Panthea Lee Reboot Embracing Informality co-author; Ethan Wilkes, Reboot Director of Communications

On a cold February Thursday night, a crowd gathered at GreenSpaces loft in New York City’s Tribeca neighborhood near Chinatown for the launch of Reboot’s publication on Embracing Informality: Designing Financial Services for China’s Marginalized. The report is based on field research conducted in China by Panthea Lee and Patrick Ainslie, supported by the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion (IMTFI). Panthea and Patrick were part of the third cohort of global researchers studying issues examining the role and challenges of mobile money for promoting greater financial inclusion for the world’s poor. Mobile money, which potentially makes value storage, transfer, and payment easier for those who are dealing with small amounts across distances and involved in a precarious and often unbanked economy, is looked upon as a hopeful tool for poverty alleviation. Yet perspectives gained from three cycles of IMTFI supported global research on mobile money (over 100 projects in 36 countries thus far) demonstrate that mobile money uptake is not as simple as providing telecommunication services and infrastructure. Local monetary ecologies, financial practices, and histories must be taken into account when developing new mobile money systems. When they are not, mobile money services may fail to reach those that might be most helped by it.

In China, mobile money is often seen as the domain of “rich people.” Business-men with fancy smart phones and linked bank accounts may be riding the emerging trend of mobile money in the country, but the majority of rural and urban poor do not have access to smart phones or bank accounts. Reboot queries how we might better design services to engage the “bottom billion” who remain financially excluded. There are a lot of regulatory issues involved of course, particularly when it comes to cash out services, but Panthea and Patrick challenge us to look beyond and below the macro to how such services might better respond to micro needs at a local level. Chinese rural to urban migrants, who face many obstacles including in the first place their very right to migrate under China's Hukou household registration policy, are limited in their ability to send remittances home by the practical challenge of how to physically move their money from point A to B. Formal remittance and banking services are limited, costly, and often intimidating. Reboot’s report begins with the story of one migrant worker who was robbed of an entire year of savings when boarding a train to bring his hard earned money back to his family in the countryside.

After gaining insight into migrants’ experiences with and needs for financial services in China, Reboot came up with recommendations on how one might design a domestic remittance service in China using mobile money for greater financial inclusion. The researchers at Reboot suggest that for such a service to appeal to economically marginal potential users, it must build upon rather than compete with existing informal financial services. Specifically, service must be convenient, practical to use, and build on existing trust networks. The report is filled with a range of ethnographic examples drawn from interviews, participant observation, and focus groups in rural, peri-urban, and urban areas of China. For the full report click here.

The importance of engaging ethnographic design for effective development was highlighted at the publication launch event Reboot hosted at Green Spaces NYC. To feature this, Ethan Wilkes, Director of Communications at Reboot hosted a lively public discussion with Panthea and Patrick, two of the study’s co-authors, along with global tech ethnographer Tricia Wang who specializes in ethnographic design and technology in China and Nicole Stubbs, CEO of First Access who specializes in credit and microfinance in informal economies. Starting with a video taken of migrant workers in the field, each of the panelists engaged in a lively conversation on financial inclusion, design, and ethnography before turning to discussion with the audience. Taking advantage of Reboot’s location in New York City, home to many social entrepreneurs, international policy experts, financial inclusion advocates, and technology start-ups, the organizers had invited a wide range of attendees and potential issue stakeholders with diverse institutional backgrounds ranging from Kiva to Social Science Research Council to IBM. Attendees asked about the investment and legal environment in China, how to think about credit histories in the informal sector, and the challenges and potentials of ethnography in development research design. For many, the chance to meet others interested in the still emerging field of financial inclusion issues was invaluable.

With cold Tsing Tao beers and hot dumplings added to the mix, the launch was altogether an enjoyable and informative evening. Who knew that going to a financial inclusion round table on a wintery Tuesday night could be so fun and productive?! IMTFI looks forward to Reboot’s research dissemination and sharing efforts going forward as they continue to provoke and catalyze discussion about not only financial inclusion, but the importance of ethnography in designing services and products for the poor – illustrating that such attention is compelling not only from a development perspective but from an emerging consumer market one as well.