What Finthropology did in 2023—and happy new year!

Finthropology would like to wish you all the best for the festive season and the new year. 

It’s been a great year for our company. The biggest news of all is that we wrote a book! You can already pre-order your copy of Customer-Centric Innovation in Finance: Leveraging Human Insights to Drive Product Innovation in the Digital Age (Kogan Page), which will be available on 30 April 2024. The book helps finance and fintech innovators understand customers' behavioural motivations to drive effective product development. The book presents real-life examples throughout of how customers are changing their behaviour in response to a fast-evolving financial landscape and provides practical advice on how to transform such insights into innovation. It explores how to produce customer insights for services that don't exist yet, for instance Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). It also provides descriptions of hands-on tools to build new insights and apply them to innovation and of methodologies such as portable kits, personas, digital ethnography, observations and interviews.

We have been doing interesting things with our Digital Finance and Farming project in Laos and Cambodia, a collaboration with Western Sydney University. We completed the first round of fieldwork in Laos (here’s a blog post with initial insights), and ran a workshop in Vientiane to present the initial results of our stakeholder mapping exercise. In early 2024 we will begin fieldwork in Cambodia. We will soon be publishing reports on the financial inclusion ecosystem in each country, and we have a forthcoming book chapter on the impact of digital financial services on women in the Global South.

Also in Southeast Asia, we published a report on apps for farmers in six countries, Digital Change in Southeast Asian Agriculture: A study of Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Philippines, East Timor, and Indonesia. The report, funded by the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR), explores the state of development of agricultural extension apps and research on digital farming in Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Philippines, East Timor, and Indonesia, in light of the active promotion of digitisation from governments and international organisations.

We did a follow-up study of e-commerce for farmers in the Philippines, carrying out the research in Lucban, a town of approximately 53,000 people located 120 kilometres to the southeast of Manila. We interviewed 23 smallholder farmers and a few local representatives of farmers’ organisations to explore the practices emerging from the introduction of e-commerce and digital financial tools in the area. The report will be launched in January 2024.

On the other side of the Atlantic, we worked with MIT to produce a report on the potential of CBDCs to foster financial inclusion, based on fieldwork in Mexico, Nigeria, Indonesia and India. 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.

Also in the USA, we did a study with the Filene Institute and CUNA Mutual Group, on how small and midsized credit unions collaborate with each other. The report, Small Credit Union Collaboration: Sharing Knowledge, Services, and People in a Digital Economy, discusses how small credit unions in the USA collaborate with each other to survive and thrive in a challenging economic environment. It explores new opportunities and risks in small credit union back-office collaboration with a focus on technology, infrastructure, governance, and culture.

For fun, we also published a walking tour of The Hague’s financial history, to honour our host city! The tour takes you from an old goldsmith’s to a savings bank for the poor, from Johan de Witte’s actuarial inventions to a home for old men.

2024 promises to be just as interesting: as well as continuing our work in Laos and Cambodia, we are working with development economists to answer the intriguing question of why smallholder farmers don’t buy more index insurance, given that economic models say they would be better off if they did. You can follow the Finthropology blog for more on this project in the next few months.

We hope your year went as well as ours did. We hope to work with you in the years to come.