Apply to the 2023 IDEO Last Mile Money Accelerator
April updates from LMM: Apply for our 2023 accelerator, attend the CICO Collective Digital Showcase, catch Haqdarshak on the news, and more
🚀 Apply for the 2023 Last Mile Money Accelerator
📣 Our biggest announcement of the month: LMM’s latest accelerator program has just opened for applications! If you’re a venture that is scaling digital financial services in emerging markets, then we’d love to see your application. This cohort, we’re particularly interested in ventures that are reaching and growing women agents, merchants, or customers.
Accepted startups will receive:
Grant funding: US$ 50K USD of non-dilutive capital to build and pilot a prototype for engaging women in digital financial services
Design support: Get weekly design office hours with IDEO designers for 8-12 weeks. In addition to UX/UI design, tap into our expertise on topics such as user research, business design, organizational design, and more. In addition, startups may be eligible to get further support from a full-time team of IDEO designers for 4-6 week design sprints.
Scale mentors: Get access to our network of mentors from telcos, FMCGs, technology firms, investors, and other organizations. Selected mentors include:
Victoria Griffith, Senior Program Officer, Financial Services for the Poor, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Gideon Abate, Head of Product, Paga
Prashanthi Ravanavarapu, Head of Product – Customer Experiences & Ventures Advisor, PayPal
Kartik Singhal, Product Manager, Paytm
Mansi Gupta, Founder, Unconform
Pheodor Njoroge, Marketing Head - Head of Marketing East and Southern Africa, Upfield
CICO Collective: Receive membership to Last Mile Money’s Cash-In Cash-Out (CICO) Collective—an online community of 1,200+ other founders and experts building for the last mile, giving you access to salons, webinars, and co-creation opportunities.
Fundraising support: We’ll set you up with one-on-one coaching for developing a powerful fundraising strategy and narrative, and offer warm introductions to help you build momentum.
Learn more about the program in our blog post and apply here by May 26 at midnight PST.
💸 Join us for the CICO Collective’s Digital Showcase on Thursday, May 11
By the time you receive this newsletter, our second CICO Collective design sprint will have concluded, focused on building a new platform for Agent Network Managers (ANMs) to expand, track, and train their networks. The platform was developed with our co-design partners: UNCDF, Africa 118, Highlight Tradings, Kazana Group, Learn.ink, and Masae Analytics, and features a wealth of features designed to help managers optimize their agent networks.
To learn more about the exciting new things we built, what we’ve learned in the process, and what’s next for the project, join us for our spring CICO Collective Digital Showcase on Thursday, May 11th at 10 AM EST. Register now for the event here.
Interested in joining the CICO Collective and getting involved in future design sprints? Reach out to Tolu Odusanya at todusanya@ideo.com.
💬 We designed industry standards for 1 billion people in a new move towards open banking in India
How do you design for a billion users?
Our latest project has the potential to reach all banked people in India—about 1 billion people—which is no small feat. Here’s how: the Reserve Bank of India recently launched Account Aggregators (AAs) to help citizens access their financial data digitally and share it with any financial service provider. AAs are set to revolutionize access to credit, wealth management, and several other digital finance use cases in India—and now, ensuring that these changes actually benefit the people they’re designed for is a crucial next step.
We partnered with Sahamati, the industry collective of organizations using AA tech, to design data consent journeys that we anticipate will inspire adoption across hundreds of organizations. Our designs are focused on providing users with agency and transparency, while also being seamless and easy to use. Learn more.
📣 Spotlight on Haqdarshak
Big news for one of our accelerator startups Haqdarshak! The platform focused on making access to government services easier for users was recently featured on BBC News India—we’re so excited for them to get such great exposure!
🌐 LMM network updates
Big updates for Kuunda! Since launching their liquidity products at the end of March 2023, Kuunda, a B2B embedded finance company that provides liquidity to the informal sector, has provided loans to over 5.8M customers—disbursing over 100M loans worth a total of $640M+.
Kuunda also recently launched a new cash advance product in Pakistan with DigiKhata, and is working towards some upcoming launches in Africa—Malawi in April and Uganda in May/June, in partnership with Airtel Money. Keep an eye peeled for future launches in Kenya, Mozambique, the Ivory Coast, and Zambia in Q3 and Q4 later this year.
Waynbo by Papersoft has also been busy. The team recently launched white label homepage categories, designed to reduce agent churn and increase retention, and introduced the ability for agents to create configurable printslips, a physical record of purchase that serves as proof of delivery, tracking information, and contact information—increasing customer trust.
The Waynbo team also recently released an update for USSD-enabled offline transactions using a smart network routing workflow, with the goal of increasing agent service resilience by enabling transactions to be performed offline and offering a seamless user experience.
🎥 Tune into a webinar on designing web3 for the last mile
In case you missed our live event, you can still catch the highlights from our recent webinar with companies who are designing innovative web3 solutions for the last mile: Designing Web3 for the Last Mile with Celo, Bitssa, Bitmama, and IDEO Last Mile Money. In this exciting conversation moderated by Becca Carroll of IDEO Last Mile Money, Eric Cuellar of Node Finance, Buhari Jemilu of Bitmama, and Kunbi Oguneye of Bitssa candidly discussed common challenges and how they’re designing unique solutions to bring the best parts of web3 to some of the world’s most vulnerable users. Tune in here and subscribe to our new YouTube channel to get alerted whenever we post new videos.
📈 Launch and scale with us
If you’re interested in scaling last-mile solutions and helping financial agents grow, we’d love to hear from you! Get in touch with our team at LastMileMoney@ideo.com