Last Mile Money: 2022 Year-In-Review
Four years in, and we’ve got a lot to look back on at IDEO Last Mile Money
Four years in, and we’ve got a lot to look back on at IDEO Last Mile Money, namely our two themes of launching and scaling. In this month’s update, we’d like to share some highlights from the past year building at the intersection of financial inclusion and the last mile, looking at what we achieved and the impact it had. We’ll also share some links to register for a couple exciting events we have coming up!
📅 Learn why women make better agents on Tuesday, January 31
In collaboration with CGAP, we’ll share insights from our rural-agent pilot in Indonesia where women were the Star Agents. We’ll present our approach to rural distribution, discuss key insights on what makes a good agent, and hear from our partners at GrabKios and Cargill. Spots are limited! Register at this link.
📅 Join a virtual design salon with web3 founders on Tuesday, February 7
Participate in a virtual design salon with founders building products at the last mile on Tuesday, February 7thm 8-9am Pacific Time. It’s going to be a small, intimate gathering with plenty of audience interaction. Sign up here.
🚀 Looking back at a year of launching and scaling
2022 was another one for the books. A quick overview follows.
2022 by the numbers:
👋🏽 Worked with 50 organizations
📱 Built 14 prototypes with our partners
🌍 Ran 30 Product Reviews
🛫 Ran 16 pilots in 18 countries
5️⃣ Our top 5 highlights from 2022
1. We helped nearly 10,000 Unilever merchants digitise their business operations
We partnered with Unilever in a multi-year, multi-country engagement to support merchant digitisation around the world. The highlights (read more here):
Pakistan: Worked with Finja to create access to Islamic finance for 50,000 merchants, with a focus on rural women merchants.
Kenya: Partnered with the MasterCard Jaza Duka team to improve adoption so that merchants could more frequently and consistently access working capital.
India: Collaborated with HUL and fintech partner Mosambee to launch ZyadaShop, a digital storefront recognised by Playstore as an emerging star app. They currently serve over 50,000 users, with 16,000 active users and 38,000 stores.
2. We scaled our impact with Product Reviews and our Financial Confidence Figma Library
In August 2022, we launched a new way to reach many more organizations through one-hour design critiques and workshops. We designed these Product Reviews to be easy to access, lightweight, and built on past insights and experiences applying Digital Confidence, as well as our Financial Confidence Figma Library. Right away, we got feedback on the impact these sessions were having on partners like Jocata in India. Following that, in October we launched an offering to Celo ecosystem startups to improve how Web3 products can help low-income people, with funding from Celo Foundation.
After five months, we’ve conducted 30 Product Reviews with an exciting range of startups. In 2023, we’ll be continuing our Product Reviews and expanding our Design Library.
3. We continued to invest in impactful fintechs
Following the success of our first accelerator, we launched the 2022 LMM Startup Accelerator and welcomed six exciting startups into the cohort. In addition to a $50K grant and membership in the CICO Collective (more on that below!), each startup received custom design support based on their needs, accessing a Design Sprint, a Designer-on-Loan, or Design Office Hours. By the numbers:
14 startups engaged across two cohorts
14 products in market or in pilot
17+ markets covered by our cohorts
Curious how the companies are doing now? Check out our spotlights on Paisa and Opareta—with more coming soon!
4. Our partners piloted and launched, with support from us
2022 was an exciting year to watch our partners make some big moves. Here are the highlights:
Tanda scaled up a peer-to-peer float rebalancing product to serve 200,000 mobile-money agents in Kenya. The idea began as an LMM design sprint focused on the concept of Uber-izing float and cash to solve liquidity gaps for agents. Today, P2P float rebalancing has become one of Tanda’s best-performing products and is still growing: liquidity remains a persistent challenge for agents, both new and established, and the P2P solution is more convenient and responsive than traditional liquidity solutions, even driving increased income for agents and float sellers.
Mool, a neobank in India, launched to 250,000 users. We previously worked with them to design a savings and investment offering for low income, rural customers.
Building on our work together last year on reimagining remittances in the UAE, NOW Money has since reached 150,000 users, with a 79% increase in the number of onboarded users that are active, and a growth of 70% in successful remittance completion.
5. We brought together collaborators with the newly relaunched CICO Collective
Building more effective, user-friendly CICO agent networks is important for growing financial inclusion and prosperity, ensuring more people can benefit from digital financial systems. With engagement from 40 leading organizations in the sector—including Vodafone, GSMA, CGAP, and others—we relaunched the CICO Collective as a platform to share best practices, as well as a place to run experiments and learn from failure together.
In our first round of two sprints, we examined cash liquidity and cash management for agents. Check out this recap of our first sprint where we build an inventory and cash tracking app for merchants with Boost and Topos, and stay tuned for a recap of our second sprint (coming soon on our Medium) about a tool we built called ReFloat to help agents anticipate their float needs with FIA and Waynbo.
Launch and scale with us.
If you’re interested in scaling last-mile solutions and helping financial agents to grow, we’d love to hear from you. You can reach us at LastMileMoney@ideo.com