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> Posted by Alissa Fishbane and Allison Daminger, Ideas42
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What does it take to successfully design, pilot, and scale an effective new financial product or service? Much more than most would realize! That’s why CFI’s recent behavioral insights workshop in Bogota, Colombia, had a clear focus: understanding the challenges of applying behavioral science to the operations of Latin American financial institutions. CFI asked ideas42 to kick off the day with an overview of behavioral science and its implications for the design and scale-up of financial products.
At ideas42, we use insights from behavioral science to diagnose behavioral bottlenecks preventing people from taking their desired actions, and design remedies that help organizations overcome them. We then measure the impact of these remedies through a randomized evaluation before they are fully scaled. Any successful program that hinges on people’s decisions and actions, as nearly all consumer finance initiatives do, requires a behavioral approach. Read the rest of this entry »
> Posted by Alexandra Fiorillo, Principal, GRID Impact
With more than 2.5 billion people around the world remaining un- or underbanked and major fluctuations in activity and usage among existing accounts, the financial inclusion industry still has work to do to increase the uptake and adoption of new products and services while also increasing the number of regularly active clients.
Many people understand the potential benefit of financial services and have the intention to use savings and loan products to improve their financial well-being. However, research shows that human beings do not always follow-through on their intentions. Frequently, we experience an intention-action gap due to psychological and external factors.
If we want to achieve full financial inclusion, we cannot simply offer more financial products and services to more people and hope they need, want, like, and use them. Instead, we should spend the necessary resources to ensure our products and services work for clients by doing two things:
1. Design products that meet the needs, desires, and preferences of our clients by collaborating with them on the design and delivery of these products.
2. Help our clients follow-through with the intentions and goals they have for their financial lives by focusing on taking action rather than just providing more information.
A new approach to product and service innovation, behavioral research and design, attempts to do just this. Drawing on insights from behavioral economics and principles from human-centered design, behavioral research and design attempts to uncover deep personal and contextual motivators and influencers to human behavior so we can better design products and services in a client-centered way. The goal of this method is not to focus on stated preferences and opinion or market research, but rather to develop deep empathy for human needs and desires while also making sense of observable behaviors – which may be contrary to people’s stated preferences. The tools often used in this approach involve in-depth interviews, behavioral and empathy mapping, customer journey maps, and other techniques focused on a small, indicative group of people. The multidisciplinary approach can help us better understand the motivations underlying people’s current behaviors and help us make more informed predictions about how people will behave when faced with new decisions in the future.
The following post, written by Tilman Ehrbeck, CEO of CGAP, was originally published on the Huffington Post Business Blog, with the title Behavioral Insights to Advance Financial Inclusion — or Why Swedes Are Not Necessarily Better Human Beings Than Danes.
In Sweden, all new drivers start out registered to be organ donors in the event of their passing. They have the freedom to opt out without negative consequences. Fourteen percent decide to do so and 86 percent remain organ donors. Across the Oresund, less than 10 miles away, Danes have to proactively decide whether they want to become organ donors. Less than 5 percent do, and more than 95 percent don’t. On the global scale of things, Sweden and Denmark are culturally quite similar: generally credited with being open-minded, socially responsible, common-sense Scandinavians.
The vast difference between Swedish and Danish organ donor participation rates (technically “presumed consent”) despite all the cultural similarities is one of the most dramatic examples of the power of policy design that takes into account pervasive human cognitive and behavioral biases to help us do what we generally think is a good thing, but often have a hard time following through with. One such bias is that, when decisions are tough, we tend to prefer the status quo; and relatedly, it’s much harder to proactively opt for something, rather than to simply stick with the offered default choice. (The approach, popularized by the term ‘nudging,’ even led the UK Prime Minister to set up a ‘nudge’ policy advisory unit.)
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