Introducing the CICO Collective

How and why we’re bringing together different players to tackle the biggest challenges in financial inclusion

Together, we can do more. That’s the thinking behind the CICO Collective, the latest launch from Last Mile Money, a global initiative from IDEO.

CICO, which stands for Cash-In/Cash-Out, refers to the point where cash is translated into digital money and vice versa. Essentially, it’s a key moment for the digitization of underserved and often rural communities at the last mile, where cash is still king for everyday transactions. Building more effective, user-friendly CICO agent networks is important for growing financial inclusion and prosperity, ensuring more people can benefit from digital financial systems.

Several attempts and global initiatives have tried to better include some of the most marginalized groups in digital financial systems. While some have been successful, many have failed. We see value in the lessons learned from both success and failures. As the global financial landscape is constantly evolving, we know that our thinking around solving some of its issues must keep pace.

The CICO Collective aims to create a community around this knowledge, sharing insights from our work in different markets, communities, and cultures around the world and enabling a global lens to help us build better financial systems.

Keep reading to learn more about the CICO Collective — and how to get involved.

What is the CICO Collective?

Overview

The CICO Collective is a group of organizations that have come together to work on unique solutions to advance the development of novel CICO innovations while ensuring that, as a global community, we are meeting the financial needs of those who are typically underserved.

The collective is a platform for learning and sharing best practices that empower members to build impactful products.

Members convene quarterly to share knowledge and co-create design briefs that will be developed into collaborative design sprints, with insights shared across the collective.

Collective members have access to the following:

• Product reviews with IDEO Last Mile Money team. This initiative provides product review/feedback and design support to ventures that want to make their products more accessible to digitally low-literate users and accelerate financial inclusion.
• Design sprints in collaboration with IDEO Last Mile Money. Help us design, create, and pilot new CICO solutions based on challenges and pain points that both providers and end users are currently facing.
• Co-authoring thought leadership with the Last Mile Money team and sharing your ideas with our truly global platform and diverse network of actors operating within the Financial inclusion space.
• Attend convening and learning events held regularly to share new ideas and help unpack shared challenges when designing financial services for people at the last mile.

Shared core goals

The CICO Collective is organized around three key goals:

• Provide a platform for learning and sharing best practices: By hosting and carefully curating a space for industry experts to meet and share ideas, we aim to move closer to defining best practices when creating novel financial services for users at the last mile.
• Offer a place to run experiments and learn from failure: A fundamental principle we adhere to is building to learn. We don’t believe that all of our experiments will be successful, but we know that we’ll learn through running them. We believe that by working in a scrappy yet rigorous way, we can move quickly as a community towards viable solutions.
• Empower others to build impactful products that better serve the underserved: We believe in collaboration between different scale organizations across varying markets. Through this, we aim to foster cross-pollination of ideas, making it easier for new concepts to build upon previous learnings.

User-oriented objectives

Ultimately, the CICO Collective is aligned with Last Mile Money’s core objectives to:

• Increase agent income: We believe that agent business viability will drive the increased reach of digital financial services into the last mile.
• Digitize commerce: We believe embedding e-commerce into last-mile commerce will shorten the transition to a digital financial ecosystem.
• Build digital confidence: We believe that building digital confidence among new internet users is a prerequisite to the adoption and use of formal financial services.

A collective model, a global lens

At Last Mile Money, we believe in a collective model for multiple reasons. First, it allows all of our collective members to grow their core knowledge by aggregating insights across markets.

This sharing of insights and resources is key to the power of the collective. The CICO Collective, in particular, also fosters collaboration between more prominent ecosystem actors and smaller, less-established organizations that champion designing for underserved markets. This creates the possibility for all members to shape the CICO agenda collectively, building a mission that accounts for more users and more markets globally.

Additionally, we believe that a collective model allows partners an opportunity to test ideas and learn at a scale that might otherwise be unattainable by any individual member working independently — a true example of how we can do more together.

Structure and members

The current CICO Collective model is built around three layers: steering committee members, implementation members, and learning community members.

Steering committee members

A group of thought leaders from organizations actively shaping the CICO agenda. Drawing on the members’ expertise, networks, and institutional knowledge, the steering committee will guide the collective’s ingoing hypotheses and focus areas. Current steering members include GSMA, CGAP, UNCDF, Altai, Fia, Mpesa Africa, MSC.

Core collaborators

A group of organizations willing to commit dedicated team time towards identifying and framing common challenges and collaboratively developing solutions. Based on the quarterly thematic focus area, implementation members will frame design briefs, with Last Mile Money inviting relevant members to participate in design sprints.

Learning community members

A group of organizations and individuals interested in current and future trends around CICO. The collective will shape their agendas and inform their thinking by exposing them to expert opinions and emerging best practices and fostering new relationships.

How to get involved with the CICO Collective

We’re currently in the process of planning our activities for the rest of 2022, including launching thematic collective convenings that will lead to the creation of priority themes for the year. We’re excited to co-create our first design briefs as a collective and look forward to building a more inclusive financial future, together.

To get involved at any level of membership, please reach out to Tolu. We look forward to hearing from you.