Summer is here! Hot updates from Last Mile Money at the start of June ☀️
Big news on the horizon, an upcoming webinar with Economist Impact on CICO Diagnostics in Nigeria, Samvaad 2023 highlights, and your summer reading list
🎥 Coming up on June 7: Economist Impact Webinar—Nigeria Deep Dive
LMM has partnered with the Lagos Business School and the Sustainable and Inclusive Digital Financial Services (SIDFS) to provide CICO Collective knowledge sharing and design expertise to their members, which include financial service providers, agent networks, policymakers, and regulators in Nigeria.
On June 7, Economist Impact will share findings from a first-of-its-kind Cash Point Diagnostic Tool, with a specific focus on Nigeria (following our public webinar featuring Economist Impact in April). The June 7 presentation is specifically for Nigeria DFS/CICO actors and by invitation only. If you are interested, please reach out to us.
💬 Bringing a human-centered lens to Account Aggregator design: Samvaad 2023
On May 24th, our very own Kanika and Dipika hosted a talk at Samvaad, 2023—India’s first Account Aggregator (AA) event organized by Sahamati and NPCI (National Payments Corporation of India). The team presented our recent work with Sahamati and several leading banks, fintechs, and Account Aggregators in India focused on designing a data consent flow to onboard a billion Indians to the Central Bank of India, as part of a new move towards open banking.
Account Aggregator is the latest addition to the India Stack, a collection of digital public infrastructure. Reflecting on how its launch feels like the next big UPI-like moment, Kanika and Dipika brought back the following learnings:
We've only scratched the surface in terms of what's possible! This is going to be a big unlock not just for near-instant and low-cost underwriting and identity verification, but democratizing access to better ways in which people can manage and grow their money.
AA is at the cutting edge of what consent and data ownership can look like, but people are so accustomed to the current status quo that they don't have existing mental models for how best to exercise this new-found agency. There is a huge role for good design in boosting financial and digital confidence, especially for those who are new to formal finance.
This is powerful technology but it needs to be used responsibly with an industry-wide effort to build guardrails around misuse and mismanagement of data.
Assisted models are going to stay for a while—both at larger banks and rural/cooperative banks.
Congratulations to Anukriti, Becca, Dipika, and Kanika on this incredible work on building reference flows for how users can leverage this new technology to get access to better credit, wealth management services, and more! Learn more here about the work.
📣 Big news in financial confidence coming soon!
We can’t say too much yet, but stay tuned for a big announcement about digital financial confidence coming later this month! 👀
🌐 LMM network updates
Pesakit is hiring a COO! Do you know someone with a founder mindset who could make a great COO? Please recommend them to PesaKit. They are looking to fill the position by July 2023 with an agile individual with experience operating and growing businesses in East or West Africa. Email Andrew Mutua at andrew@pesakit.ai for more information.
📚 What we’re reading this month
📝 Having just wrapped up work on consent flows for Account Aggregators, we loved this post from Dvara Research on the role of design to make consent artifacts more effective for constrained users.
🎨 Understanding what makes for bad design is as important as understanding what makes for good design—read about D91’s audit on deceptive design in popular fintech apps in India and the negative consequences.
📖 As we think about the future, we’re reading GSMA's 2023 State of the Industry Report on Mobile Money. (Watch the 30 min video summary here.) We also love the Economist’s Cashless talk—a special report on digital finance.
📲 If you’re thinking about web3 use cases in emerging markets, check out Mercy Corps Ventures’ Crypto for Good Fund and their accompanying research.
💸 In real-world events, at the end of 2022, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) decided to mop up excess cash in the economy and push more of the population towards its cashless policy by redesigning the Naira and limiting cash withdrawal amounts. Learn more here about the complicated consequences of this on CICO networks and small merchants, the shifting role of fintech payment players, and more.
📈 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