Accelerating the design of financial products for low-income groups in Northern India

Jan 20 - ongoing

I spent ten days in Delhi in early Feb 2020 after a whirlwind of winning and onboarding to a one-year project with global impact organisation Micro-Save Consulting (MSC).

MSC are active in India where they are helping build support for government initiatives aiming to drive financial inclusion amongst the poor. One of MSCs core competencies is behavioural change, and to this they wanted to add UX Research and Design. From a programme perspective I was tasked with findings ways that UX practices could strengthen the methods and delivery of their behavioural research delivery into the Government Programme ‘Pathways to Enhancing Financial Inclusion in India (PEFI)’ whilst upping the UX skillset of the MSC Northern India teams.

I partnered with UK organisation Risk Frontier (RF) who have a great relationship with MSC and tag-teamed with RF’s Jenny Hoffmann who took over from me as I left Delhi for Kampala (to kick-off another project).

Strengthening all the links in the distribution chain

As with many financial services, in the PEFI initiative there is an agent network between provider and customer, and the needs of the agents in the network must be understood and supported if the agents are in turn is to support customers.

The Indian government had persuaded mobile airtime providers, who have extensive agent networks through which they also market financial products, to allow their financial inclusion products to piggy-back on the existing networks for distribution. But the agents weren’t effectively engaged, and a programme of behavioural change pilot projects was being designed by MSC to address this.

My objective was to apply UX to the ‘why’ to strengthen agent network management practices, whilst showing the MSC team how to do this

Working on the street in Delhi

It was a great time to join the project. Over ten days of working, workshopping and researching in the field, the MSC team started to embrace the core principles of human centred design, including contextual research, how to handle cultural sensitivities, why skinny just-in-time prototyping is the way forward, how to do business and customer needs capture, how to differentiate and call out assumptions dressed up as facts, and the idea that open, visual, messy collaborative working is good!

Jenny took over from me when I left for Kampala and we had daily breakfast meetings between India and Africa to ensure consistency and trouble-shoot. All was set for a stimulating year of working and piloting and regular visits to Delhi, as we collaborated with the team to develop a new MSC-relevant, human centred design process. But then C19. Lock-down in the UK and India - everything stopped.

CI9 drove innovation and ‘can-do’ thinking

By July I had itchy-feet, it was clear that C-19 wasn’t going away and it felt like the wheels might come off the project. In the previous 4 months I had made a lot of progress in my own practice of remote research, workshopping and design and Jenny and I agreed that we had seen patterns in MSCs design process that would benefit from change. We proposed to the Indian team that we work with them remotely to develop a leaner, accelerated design process for their pilots, that involved less waterfall and more agile. That would be ready for deployment when Indian lock-down lifted and work started again on the pilots. This we did between September and December 2020, using MIRO extensively to run a series of remote, collaborative workshops that involved some pre-workshop work for the Indian team and a lot of post-workshop work for us. Between workshops we sought feedback on the evolving process and iterated the process ready for presentation at the next.

The design process we collectively created fuses Google Sprint methodologies with some of the more in-depth research processes that lie at the heart of MSCs identity. The new accelerated, lean process is designed to deliver testable prototypes within several weeks rather than many months. It embraces tools such as a business canvas to promote explicit challenge to the acceptance of implicit assumptions, the concept of ‘just enough’ in prototyping and testing, explicit reflection points and also encourages a relentless focus on what is needed to get to an answer, and not what is simply nice to know.

After running training workshops with the MSC team. We wrapped the design process description up into an attractive, clear ‘How To’ document that will be shared and buy credibility with the airtime networks and be used as a starting place for the team. This will be a living process – in essence we have delivered an MVP (where P = process) – and expect to learn and evolve the process with use. Currently we are considering which pilot projects are most suitable for the roll out of what will be an entirely new way of working for the MSC team.