Finthropology’s year in review—and big news for 2025
It’s that time of year again—one in which we reflect on our achievements and struggles, and start looking ahead to a new year. It’s certainly been an interesting one here at Finthropology, featuring a new book, fieldwork in Southeast Asia, several new reports and various travels to conferences.
By far and away, the highlight of 2024 was publishing our book, Customer-Centric Innovation in Finance: Leveraging Human Insights to Drive Product Innovation in the Digital Age (KoganPage). Published in April, the book gained quite a lot of attention. We were invited to discuss it on several podcasts, including Paolo Sironis’s The Bankers’ Bookshelf, Greg Palmers’s Finovate podcast, Fintech Futures’s Demistify podcast, and Theodora Lau’s One Vision podcast.
We gained great comments on the book. Bill Maurer, Dean University of California Irvine called it a “compelling guidebook to finance as, above all, a human practice,” Lisa Frazier, COO Judo Bank named it a reminder “that people make financial decisions, not technology and that technology enables people”. Anne-Laure Mention, Professor of Management, RMIT University found it a “much needed book in the current digital age”. Ronit Ghose, Future of Finance, Citi made the point that “money and finance are fundamentally about people and communities.” We found this very encouraging, and indeed, our attendance at conferences throughout the year has reinforced our perception that industry interest in customer-centricity is growing at a steady rate.
While the book discusses customer-centricity in financial services all over the world, this year our projects mostly focused on Southeast Asia. In January, we published a report on digital transformation in the Philippines (funded by ACIAR), which is based on field research in a small town in the southern part of the country. We interviewed farmers to learn about emerging practices regarding financial and e-commerce services.
We continued our research on digital finance and farming in Laos and Cambodia. Together with the four university teams, we undertook the second round of interviews with farmers in Siem Reap and Luang Prabang, and completed a household survey in Cambodia. We also launched a report, The Financial Ecosystem for Smallholder Farming Households in Lao PDR.
Closer to home, we ran a workshop at European Microfinance Week in Luxembourg in November, in which we gathered industry leaders together for a discussion of how financial services aimed at low-income people are digitizing, exploring both the positive and negative aspects of digitization.
Our breaking news, however, is that we are writing another book! Digital Human Finance: Exploring Embeddedness, Inclusion, and Social Realities, will be published in late 2025 by Edward Elgar Publishing. Anette and Erin are co-authoring it along with two academics, Dr. Shriram Venkantraman and Dr. Jillet Sarah Sam. The book will bring the human aspects of digital finance to the fore, drawing on a wide range of research. Watch this space for more news.
We hope you have time to relax these holidays, and we wish you all the best for 2025.
