Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
The banking industry is missing out on a huge opportunity to transform itself from a transactional model to an engagement model, writes social media strategist Jay Deragon on AlwaysOn. “Think about what lies within the system of banking: people and…
A number of articles illustrate the power of the mobile phone in emerging markets: What next after the Mobile revolution in Kenya? by John Karanja MPESA will be on its own a major driver of the economic expansion of the…
Nokia user researcher Jan Chipchase has posted an in-depth presentation and paper on designing mobile money services for emerging markets: “Hang around a telecoms industry conference long enough and you start to get big-number fatigue – as one stack of…
The November 2009 edition of Mobile Money Africa, “Africa’s leading online resource for mobile financial inclusion”, is entitled “Banking the unbanked Africans” and is entirely available for download. The December edition will focus on Mobile Money and Payment technologies for…
Philips Design and ABN AMRO’s Dialogues Incubator cooperate to create the ‘Rationalizer’ concept, an emotion sensing system targeted at serious home investors who trade online. It acts as an ’emotion mirror’ in which the intensity of the user’s feelings is…
Katrin Verclas of MobileActive is launching a new series on “deconstructing mobiles for development”. Mobile tech as a tool for social development is making the front pages in 2009. They are hyped as panathea for global issues such as rural…
The Wall Street Journal looks at the rise of alternative currencies: “The weak dollar. A Federal Reserve constantly being second-guessed. It’s times like these when talk inevitably turns to alternative or complementary currencies. While local currencies have come and gone,…
In emerging markets, agents are the customer-facing element for mobile banking providers, “who rely on them to open accounts, do customer care, and (crucially) stock adequate amounts of cash and e-float to enable clients to deposit and withdrawal. Yet, there…
Oliver Reichenstein, a Tokyo-based information architect, explores the value of information: “While producing information costs money, information as such doesn’t necessarily carry monetary value; it mostly carries intellectual, social, artistic, practical value. And that’s why, historically, news has been commercially,…
Yesterday, Nokia launched Nokia Money, a new mobile financial service enables financial management and payments from a mobile phone – aimed specifically at emerging markets. From the Nokia press release: “Nokia Money has been designed to be as simple and…
Fast Company explores what neighbourhood currency would look like: “Hyper-localized currencies have been popping ever since the economy went sour–not surprising, since local currencies also gained popularity during the Great Depression. Five local Massachusetts banks have developed Berkshares–there are 185,000…
According to CNN, mobile phones in the United States will be able – within five (5!) years – to make electronic payments, open doors, access subways, clip coupons and possibly act as another form of identification. But there is work…
CGAP has published a brief entitled “Poor People Using Mobile Financial Services: Observations on Customer Usage and Impact from M-PESA”. “Despite growing agreement on the potential of technology to expand access to finance, or branchless banking, there is surprisingly little…
Millions of Africans are using mobile phones to pay bills, move cash and buy basic everyday items. So why, asks the BBC, has a form of banking that has proved a dead duck in the West been such a hit…
Gunnar Camner and Emil Sjöblom recently spent three months in Tanzania for their master’s thesis in Media Technology at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden, to investigate mobile banking services from a user perspective. In which contexts…
John Clippinger, who directs the Law Lab at Harvard University, predicts, in this video on Nokia’s IdeasProject, a huge shift over the next one to two years in the way people manage their identities. He asserts that “user-centric identity, “the…
Olga Morawczynski, a doctoral candidate at the University of Edinburgh and has spent more than a year investigating customer adoption and usage in both urban and rural Kenya, and has been sharing some of her insights on the CGAP blog.…
The Wall Street Journal and India Knowledge@Wharton present a unique mix of reporting, analysis, interviews and video on life and business in rural India. The Rural India reader resource combines specially-commissioned material with recent articles. A selection of articles relevant…
Stowe Boyd, an internationally recognised authority on social applications and their impact on business, media, and society, launched a new interview series examining the future of money. The series is sponsored in part by Neo.org, a non-profit he is working…
Barclays 360 magazine, a quarterly thought leadership magazine for senior management within the Barclays Group, is devoted to simplicity in product and service design. Here are the feature articles (of which the last one, which is excellently written and directly…