Last Mile Money: 2020 Year-In-Review
Two years ago, our team at IDEO launched Last Mile Money, a global collaborative network focused on connecting underserved communities to the digital economy. In collaboration with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, we’ve since partnered with a number of private, social, and public sector partners in India, Indonesia, and East Africa to prototype, pilot, and invest in financial inclusion innovations.
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a disproportionate impact on low-income, rural communities. Never has it been more critical to engage everyone with digital tools, design safe mechanisms to cash in or out of digital financial services, and support people in crisis economically. This year hasn’t gone according to plan, but in the end, we hope we’ve taken meaningful steps toward designing a more equitable digital economy for all people.
2020 by the numbers:
- 🤝 Partnered with 25 organizations
- 🌏 Ran 5 pilots and 10 design sprints in India, Indonesia, and Kenya
- 💸 Worked with mobile money networks that reach 450K agents
- 🛠️ Reached 25K product builders with open-source design tools
- 👩🏽🏫 Assembled board of 12 world-class advisors
2020 Highlights:
1. Building digital confidence for new internet users
We launched the Digital Confidence Design Tools in partnership with Google Next Billion Users to help product teams build digital services that work for everyone. Regardless of where they live, what language they speak, or which device they use. Leveraging the toolkit’s approach, we ran prototyping sprints with organizations including Flipkart, Google Pay, KhataBook, Airtel Payments Bank, Eko, Frontier Markets, and NOW Money. From onboarding new users onto a payments app to helping mobile money agents add new income streams, prototypes built during these sprints have been piloted and launched with new internet users around the world.
2. Prototyping a shared agent model in Indonesia
We partnered with Bank Negara Indonesia (BNI), the fourth-largest bank in Indonesia, and Grab, a multi-national startup providing ride-sharing and e-commerce. We prototyped a shared-agent network leveraging BNI and Grab’s capabilities to offer new digital financial services to low-income customers. The joint business model we created showed a potential cost reduction of up to 6x. (Read more here.)
3. Launching a global “Agent Network Collective”
We launched a collective of 7 mobile money agent network organizations that represent a total of 250K agents in India and East/West Africa. The group prioritizes agent-specific challenges, such as onboarding or liquidity, then builds early prototypes and individual organizations test solutions and share back learnings. The first cohort includes FIA, Eko, Kudi, Topos Network, Opareta, Tanda, and PesaKit, along with guidance from CGAP.
4. Piloting a digital ordering system for merchants in India
We partnered with a large FMCG to prototype and pilot an experience that enables over 100K Indian merchants — from urban to rural — to order stock and pay their distributors digitally. Paying digitally is the first step to accessing relevant and contextual financial products and empowering them to grow their business sustainably.
5. Designing a “merchant first” credit experience
We partnered with 7 organizations to explore and build solutions focused on improving access to instant credit for micro-merchants in India. Leveraging the soon to be launched OCEN platform, these prototypes are designed to improve merchant comprehension of credit, its terms while also building in safety nets to protect them from over-indebtedness. (Read more here.)
Come build with us.
If you are interested in the problems of last-mile financial inclusion and helping micro-merchants grow, we’d love to hear from you. You can reach us at LastMileMoney@ideo.com.
Co-authored by Becca Carrol, Kanika Kumar, John Won
