Bringing Unexpected Collaborators Together: How the CICO Collective Helped Create ReFloat, a Float-Balancing App for Mobile Money Agents
The second design sprint for IDEO Last Mile Money’s CICO Collective started off with a single question:
How might we support agents to predict their float demands early and ensure the reliability and consistency of their services to customers?
After successfully completing our first design sprint, which also focused on liquidity and cash management for agents, we were interested in exploring more ways to help agents at the last mile grow their resiliency — and their businesses.
We developed ReFloat, a platform that allows agents to assess their performance and manage their float. In this mode, they can review their cash flow and predict their daily cash needs based on their historical data. Agents can also generate personalized reports, track their goals, and analyze their financials. ReFloat gives agents the power to understand their business and make better decisions. Here’s how it all came together.
Choosing our partners
We chose to work with two unique companies from the CICO Collective who we felt were working in the right space to address this problem: FIA and Waynbo. Our initial hunch was that by bringing together an agent network manager and a platform that provides tools for agent network managers, they could find common ground and identify what each party would need from the solution to make it a viable business opportunity.
Although they’re technically competitors, the fact that they serve markets in different continents allowed us to forge a non-competitive collaboration between them. Here’s who we worked with:
- FIA is a neobank. They partner with mobile money agents to reach 95% of India and 90% of Nepal, focusing on uplifting women agents.
- Waynbo is a mobile-first agent marketplace focused in Africa. Within this marketplace, agents can tap into additional opportunities for income and engage with tools to help them more conveniently manage their money. (Learn more about Waynbo in our article on how to future-proof mobile money agents.)
“When the CICO Collective initially presented us with the challenge for the sprint, we felt the major problem statement made sense for us. We’re looking at how do we get high-performing agents on a journey that makes them even more valuable to the ecosystem?” — Daniel Alves, CEO of Papersoft, Waynbo’s parent company.
Why liquidity is often the missing piece in the mobile money agent puzzle
Next, we began with research into our users. Although we initially went into the sprint with the goal of building a tool for “super agents,” we quickly discovered we had a bigger opportunity to turn “ad hoc” agents into reliable agents by helping them easily and effectively manage their float. With over 70% of agents on Waynbo’s platform falling under this archetype, it made sense to focus on their needs and ultimately make a bigger impact.
We also researched the best time of day to provide the information needed to optimize their business performance and concluded that targeting the end of the day was the most effective, as agents have too much incoming information during the day. By providing useful information at the end of their day, agents can plan for the next day’s transactions.
Why does access to liquidity matter so much for agents? It can impact their bottom line: if an agent doesn’t have enough money to complete a transaction, either physical cash or digital funds, then they can no longer serve their customers, and they miss out on the opportunity to generate income. This is an especially relevant issue for ad hoc agents, who tend to be more reactive in their business requests, often asking customers to wait until they are able to access more float.
Developing our design principles
To begin to craft an informative float rebalancing tool for ad hoc agents, we relied on established Digital Confidence principles in order to onboard and communicate with users. Some of the key principles we used were:
- Let users look before they leap: Users with low digital confidence need to try out apps and features without risk before committing. Allow users to preview experiences. This helps them discover new possibilities, overcome the fear of doing something “wrong,” and weigh the data, storage, or cost commitments associated with each task.
- Suggest relevant options: When users become overwhelmed, they often avoid making choices altogether. Suggest options that reduce the complexity of choices and demonstrate your product’s relevance.
- Use simple, translatable language: Users typically skim text and often have their phone set to a language in which they are not fluent. Choose language that’s short, simple, and direct, and add cues that direct users without any words at all.
We also developed our own principles specific to this project based on our user research:
- Timely & effective communication: Focus on moments that do not impede agents’ business hours. Agents receive hundreds of notifications on transactions all day. For rebalancing advice notifications, agent networks should consider start of day and end of day as key moments, before agents start transacting and when they close shop, respectively.
- Set the product apart: Make space for the new product to be seen and show its worth. Differentiate the rebalancing feature from other app features; create it as a self-contained task with unique branding to make it stand out.
Introducing ReFloat
Originally, we had planned to build a white-label solution that both partners could plug into, but as we got deeper into the sprint, we realized that it made more sense to build on top of Waynbo’s existing platform.
What we landed with was a tool called ReFloat — an alternative toggle mode on Waynbo’s platform — that helps agents to learn how they performed for the day, review their cash flow, and anticipate how much money they would likely need to serve their customers in the coming days. This prediction is based on the agent’s history, as well as data provided by GSMA using their mobile network operators to track cash-in/cash-out transactions.
Due to the nature of their business and the high volume of messages they receive, agents rarely have time during the day to pause and strategize on how to best approach their business. They normally do so when they close, so we built ReFloat as an end-of-day recap, to reach agents when they’re most likely and able to take a pause in their operations.
What’s next
Ultimately, both FIA and Waynbo found incredible value in the prototype, and are in talks to move forward with testing the feature with more users.
As Daniel explained, “I’m very happy with the results, but honestly the exercise itself was great too because we got to do things that we don’t usually do. Having the structure of a design sprint forced us to review and map out our user persona’s needs and communication styles in greater detail, helping us to really put ourselves in our users’ shoes. Also, learning how many of our agents were actually ad hoc agents versus how many of our agents were actually relying on CICO transactions as primary source of liquidity was very insightful. We’ve found gaps and have a lot of new ideas to explore.”
