New report on CBDC and financial inclusion

Finthropology are honoured to have contributed research and analysis to a new report on Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC).

The report, published by the MIT Digital Currency Initiative (MIT DCI) and Maiden Labs, asks what CBDC designers need to understand most in order “to create a digital currency that expands financial inclusion and operates in the public interest”, rather than creating a new digital divide. The findings are based on original user research in four countries: Mexico, Nigeria, India and Indonesia, as well as design research and infrastructure research.

The research was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Fieldwork project coordination was undertaken by the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion (IMTFI) at the University of California, Irvine.

Finthropology’s primary role was to analyse the ethnographic material from the four countries and synthesie it with the report’s main arguments. Additionally, we created an overview of fieldwork contexts describing the payment ecosystems in the four countries of study, which can be found in a separate appendix. 

The report and appendix can be downloaded for free from the MIT DCI website.