Rebuilding Service Design with Financial Inclusion
By Jez Williams & Rubia Sinha-Roy
This article discusses how financial inclusion affects people in different ways, and why service design has the potential to embed financial inclusivity across all sectors as a driver for change — not just through Financial Services.
As Rubia stands up, accidentally revealing her Harry Potter pyjama bottoms on screen, we continue our self-doubting spiral, discussing whether we’re even the right people to write about financial inclusion. “What do two middle class Big Four consultants even know about this? Do we actually have anything useful to write? Will people even care what we think?”
After much back and forth, we refocus and revisit our role as service designers: to design services that meet the needs of users, based on real-world evidence and not limited by our own experiences. Rubia gets passionate at this point, “But service design hasn’t really evolved at the rate society has. We have a responsibility to ensure we’re consciously designing in ways that are fair for everyone, but it doesn’t always feel that way.” Jez adds, “Yes! And why is it that financial inclusion is so often overlooked?” It seems that when talking about inclusivity, it’s all too easy to overlook the important part that financial inclusion plays across nearly every service we use. Perhaps we need to broaden what we actually mean by inclusive design. And as service designers, we are accountable for this too. So, we talked ourselves back round to writing this piece.
What does financial inclusion mean?
In the context of our service design work, we take it to mean, at its heart, ‘individuals not being unfairly disadvantaged as a result of their own financial situation when using the same services and products as others’. This is important when we understand the scale of the problem highlighted by the image below, using data from the Financial Inclusion Commission and charity Fair By Design.
As service designers, we need to continue designing with empathy, but there’s a pressing need to stretch where this empathy extends to. Financially vulnerable groups in society are often marginalised and underrepresented in service design. We rarely come across projects that are asking the big questions about how to design in a financially inclusive way, especially outside of the Financial Services sector. But any service involving monetary transactions — from paying utility bills to replacing a washing machine — should lead us to consider very carefully how our design decisions impact (and are impacted by) the financial situation of the people using it.
A case in point is the UK poverty premium, which Fair By Design defines as “the extra cost of being poor”. Their real-world example of replacing a washing machine is described below.
To some extent, this inequality of service provision is linked with people having unequal access to financial services, education and information. In addition to addressing this problem, we want to know how we can change the way we design all services so that people don’t experience this type of exclusion.
Service design as a political act
Ultimately, service design is political. Service designers make decisions that impact people’s freedoms, and financial exclusion occurs when we make design decisions that restrict a person’s freedom to use the same products and services as others by making these less accessible solely based on financial situation. As designers, we are in a privileged position to challenge where we find inequities embedded in the services we create and use. Our actions have real impacts on the people and planet around us, and we are accountable to design responsibly and inclusively now more than ever considering the current global political and societal landscape.
So how can we re-evaluate the service design toolkit, ‘Marie Kondo’* it and rebuild it with financial inclusion embedded throughout our approach? How can we educate ourselves and empower each other to confidently make financially inclusive decisions?
Adding financial inclusion to our service design toolkit
We appreciate the scale of this challenge and would recommend starting with these three actions:
Listen. Firstly, go out and listen to a broad range of people with diverse backgrounds and contexts, empathise with their challenges and needs, and immerse yourself and your whole team in these research findings. This is about engaging with people who might not typically fall into a target segment due to their financial situation, but whose exclusion on such a basis can be detrimental to the financial inclusivity of the service you are designing. These are exactly the people whose needs must also be represented.
Rebuild. Secondly, break down your usual service design approach and find where you can rebuild the process to ensure no users are left behind, incorporating what you’ve learned from research. This is about questioning what you think you know, challenging ‘how it’s always been done’ and coming up with a better method.
Evolve. Lastly, keep repeating this cycle, continually adapting different pieces of your service design methodology to keep up with the constantly evolving societal and political discourse and corresponding changing human needs. This is about staying current and being able to constantly adapt to change, revisiting and redefining the range of human characteristics and attributes that you consider as part of your design process.
Equally important throughout these steps is the need to bring diverse perspectives together within your own team, not just with a range of socioeconomic backgrounds, but also different cultures and broader experiences. Team diversity can help to combat unconscious bias as well as contribute to more creative output.
If you’re the type of person who skips to the end, here’s our key takeaway: there is an urgency to design more financially inclusive services, which means changing the way we approach service design as a whole. As responsible service designers, we need to constantly challenge the status quo, not designing for today, but for tomorrow.
*This piece is in no way affiliated with Marie Kondo or her company, we are just big fans.
By Jez Williams — Service Designer, Deloitte Digital & Rubia Sinha-Roy — Experience Designer, Deloitte Digital
Additional description of images used in this article for users using a screen reader
Image 1: The scale of financial exclusion in the UK.
This image contains the following statistics gathered by the Financial Inclusion Commission and the charity Fair by Design:
- 1 million+ people in the UK do not have a bank account
- 1 in 5 UK adults would not be able to cover more than 1 month of living expenses if they lost their source of income
- £490 is the extra cost of the UK Poverty Premium for low-income households per year
- 12.5 million UK adults have little or no confidence in their ability to manage money
- 14 million must pay more for essential goods and services simply because of their financial situation
- 17% of the UK population are borrowing to pay for daily essentials
- 1 in 10 low-income UK households pay an additional £780 per year
Image 2: The additional cost of being poor.
This image contains the following quote from Fair by Design:
“The washing machine breaks and you have no savings to buy a new one outright. So you go to a payday lender, or a rent-to-own company, where you’ll end up paying three times as much as other people pay up front for the same washing machine on the high street.
You’re not on the best energy tariff because you just don’t have time to find the best deal. And if you’re on a pre-payment meter, on average, you will pay a third more than paying by Direct Debit — which you can’t afford to do because you don’t have a fixed amount coming in every month.”
