Perspective 2.0

Lessons from the BoP 8: Assumptions of contextual knowledge questioned to lower barriers to acceptance

Quite a few people, all quite wellknown in their fields, mostly from high tech industries, have said the equivalent regarding the BoP - "just give them the technology and they'll figure everything else out, look how creative they are etc" when it comes to introducing new products and services.

And, with world class researchers and user centered designers, they can create some great works of art, technologically speaking, that you couldn't argue with as being well designed for the BoP. However, there's a step further that's missing, the one after the introduction of the technology. And that is what I call the mysterious fuzzy factor ;p

Basically, we need to start from scratch when considering the basic user profile for whom to design said product or service for - not in terms of features, looks and style - more basic than that, which is what is your target audience's contextual knowledge of that general product category?

Let me give you an example, its a generalized one that attempts to describe the basic gap in contextual, immersive knowledge (kinda like the "dialing phone number by muscle memory home" thing where we couldnt actually tell you the number without counting our fingers) between the great majority at the base of the social and economic pyramid and mainstream consumer culture across the globe. 

Lets start with financial services alone, since that's a topic that's been buzzing around my little corner of the interwebs of late - mobile money in all shapes, forms and brands, all aimed at the underserved (not undeserved ;p). You and I, for the most part, if we're reading and writing on here, know how what is expected of us when a cashier type person hands us a little device with our credit card sticking halfway out of it and the flashing signal seeking answers from us. Or what - more or less - to do at an ATM regardless of whether the two languages offered are suomi and Svenska and we ourselves are stuck with Hindi and English. Imagine if it were kanji?  Or the difference between a credit card and a debit card and just how helpless you are as a traveller without one?

So, anyway, the point is that if there is a vast swathe of people that were hitherto unbanked, it could be said that they were also lacking in many of the subtle nuances of information and knowledge we process everyday. We must not assume that this knowledge exists - true, many in these demographics we consider the "BoP" may have had exposure to many of these things we take for granted, but there is a greater likelihood, once you combine the challenges of isolation rural residents face, that this contextual knowledge is missing.

Now, framing your future design solution in this way, how would you go about designing a new product or service for the BoP?

Mexican restaurant iconography

San Diego, October 9th 2009

Banking on the future of mobile financial transactions

Espoo, Finland on 6th November 2009

Bo Harald of Tieto Corporation shared a vision of the future that his company has been working on along with many other stakehholders. They are already in the process of implementating eInvoicing, part of something they call the Real Time Economy of financial transactions around the world. And they're making the basic part of this executable by a basic mobile phone. That means that even Ramu the teawallah, if he has to collect his accounts receivable from the MNC employees every month, they could eventually conceivably simply transfer it to his account. From what I could gather there is a finnish bank involved with the prototype and the Finns have been asked to set the standards for the EU wide system.

That is the now.

But what does it mean for the future if all transactions are eventually to be standardized over the mobile phone, regardless of the location? Would Nokia Money be part of this? And if so, what would it mean in terms of disruptive innovation? Here's another slide.

Mobile money services, contextually designed biz models for the BoP

Dave Tait shared this press release today from FNB South Africa who have just announced a very sensitively designed system for remittance across urban and rural South Africa. On the other hand is the World Money announcement by Vodafone, who are desperately trying to position their "World Money bank account required" mobile money transfer system as something to benefit billions, well maybe, but billions in dollars not people at the base of the pyramid. Here's a snippet, then lets discuss,

“Honestly, it may not be a big business for us in terms of margins because of the small transaction fee. But it will be an incredibly powerful tool for economic development, reducing social divide because it helps the underbanked and non-banked people around the world, as we have seen in Kenya,” Colao said.

Starting with that very first word, something isn't quite right if the above is supported by the below description,

It is not mandatory that the sender and recipient have standard bank accounts.
However, a potential beneficiary has to have a World Money Account with a local bank, which will be independent of one’s standard bank account. There must be sufficient credit in the account concerned to facilitate money transfer on mobile phone.
“We will help them open the World Money Account, which is currently an option for Vodafone customers. Since we have tied up our post-pay and pre-pay segments with bank accounts, it becomes easier to set up a World Money Account,” Maher explained.
Vodafone will set up a Trust to operate the World Money service and manage the accounts in the bank. All World Money customers will be beneficiaries of that trust.

This system will only make sense if the bank account that the beneficiaries are supposed to set up in local banks can be opened without the regulatory paperwork required by the bank itself to  open a standard account. Also, how will it work in villages where there may not be a physical bank, as seems to be implied by this description.

There's a lot of information about banks and money movement and mobile phones online today, @whiteafrican linked to this article on whether MPesa's success can be replicated outside of Kenya which I think seems to tie in nicely with the rest of the data points.

Mapping hyperlocal BoP markets, Ushahidi might work well

I'm going to try and describe something that Erik Hersman and I once talked about for about an hour or more over Skype back when I was still living in Singapore, could have been early this year. Anyway, we got into discussing it over email again and I have his permission to share some of these ideas.

What the Ushahidi engine does is visually flag locations with an accompanying sms text message. It could conceivably help something like Kiva.org (which is an internet website) to connect with their community of loan seekers allowing them to write back their progress and letting the loan givers visualize their money's journey and ROI.

Now, Erik feels that maps may not always be required, a list is enough but I wonder whether the maps might not eventually help when everyone can access the interwebs through 3G or something as it is a tool that transcends language and culture. Sure the sms needs the ability to read but I wouldn't be surprised if local "languages" are firming up around sms usage among the BoP in different parts of the world. I dimly recall a press release by Nokia long ago in some Indian newspaper that people who didn't know English were nevertheless familiar enough with the alphabet (they teach it even in slum schools as "english medium" these days) to come up with stuff like DD for sister (didi) and BB for wife (bibi).

Anyway, I was thinking out loud whether Ushahidi might not even help the colalife.org people as a way to keep track of the various people they work with? It might help with logistics and distribution? What happens when you integrate it with a payment method?

I bet it could also connect mobile phones by SMS to the internet?

Lessons from the BoP 7: the challenge of establishing trust, a last mile problem

Wallpainted advertising, near Kanpur, India, September 12th 2009

Along with cost, the second biggest challenge at the base of the pyramid markets is building "trust" in the community, the local equivalent of building a brand.

First, find out which media people trust the most and aim to be on three of them, the highest ranked you can afford. For TV and Radio are the most respected across the BoP world but few companies choosing to address them can afford that kind of advertising.

Second, find out how information flows by word of mouth in the community or region you seek to serve. There may be rural and urban differences, for example, in a "static" community like the factory shopfloor your maintenance men are the "movers of knowledge" or infomediaries, but in a village or market, it would be the one with a fixed location yet highly central, like the local paanwallah, Chotu.

Third, enlist the support of these individuals, giving them special status in the community, perhaps, look at how this NGO which is sharing information on nutrition and health is organizing their infomediaries.

Further reference can  be found here, on the Role of Mobile Infomediaries among BoP and of course, the brand aspect is quite well documented already.

Keeping my promise to Ben

During a Skype conference with Ben Lyon, executive director of FrontlineSMS: Credit, I said I'd write about what I was seeing in today's twenty something generation. Keep in mind, ladies and gentlemen, that Mr Lyon is but 22 and a half years old or thereabouts.

I wish I'd had the opportunities, technologies and shifting ideologies happen back when I was in my early twenties in the late 1980's, when my idealistic yearnings of making a better world to live in were stifled in silence, today I can share it with you.

Whether it was Steven B Daniels who conceived of A Better World by Design, with a little help from the VC partners, or Ben Lyon who initiated  what perhaps we'd all been sitting around and waiting  for someone to make ha5ppen, these kids are changing their world. For the better, thank you ver much, you Oldsters.

I think we should be listening to what they may have to say...

Lessons from the BoP 6: sophisticated cash flow management

Do telecenters in Sri Lanka make money? Yes. They report an average monthly income of Rs. 22,119. (=USD 201) This is associated with a relatively large standard deviation of Rs. 21,714 (= USD 197) indicating a variation within a wide range. This means a large number of telecenters are running at a loss.

This snippet from LirneAsia's post on the economic health of telecenters meant for the BoP simply shows that the target audience's variability of cash flow influences the earnings of their market. This is a key characteristic of the informal economies in which the BoP tend  to operate. Addressing this challenge will be crucial.

Lessons from the BoP 5 - save them time or make them money

You can say that's the basic BoP marketing mantra, save them some time or make them some money. This great insight comes from Dr Rohan Samarijiva of LirneAsia in Sri Lanka whom I heard speak in Singapore a couple of years ago on the findings from their recently concluded Teleuse@BoP survey.

How much time do you think a bank in a laptop would save millions of rural customers living just outside of a day's walk of the nearest bank branch?

How much money can be (saved) if that time was put to income  generating activities instead of being sunk into waiting for a bus to pass a lonely roadside stop?

That's only one example of where time and money - the two key elements of the constant uncertainty which characterizes daily life for those at the base of the social and economic pyramid - can make the difference between one frugal meal a day and perhaps two full ones. 

Quoting from my post on Dr Samarijiva's talk written back in October 2007,

Apart from the data, Dr Samarijiva added that there was immense potential for innovative and profitable business models at the BoP but service providers needed to get out of the consumption game and into the production game. That is the existing business models on the mobile platforms are based on consumption by the user - of data, infotainment, ringtones et al, not on  improving their productivity, income or saving them time or money. An example he gave was a villager making a call to receive information rather than taking a bus or walking to the nearest public phone service.

At this point I could link to a lot of writing supporting this basic contention but choose to follow up with a collection in the next post. Instead, I'll add a thought that struck me when I found that my 3 month project on the Prepaid Economy using design research methods to uncover how those on irregular incomes managed their household expenses resulted in findings similar to rigorous academic studies that took two or three years to conduct. That saving time and money for the BoP didn't just have to apply directly to services and products meant for them, that we could bring this lesson back and apply it to our product development and strategic planning frameworks.

We can focus on models of production - those that provide value beyond entertainment or filling up of "leisure" hours and not simply get distracted by models based on consumption. I think we can agree that the time is ripe right now for this shift.

Lessons from the BoP 4: Maximize constraints, minimize resources

Leather workshop, ladies NGO, Kanpur India September 14 2009

During a long skype conversation with Scott Smith, who recently wrote about the just launched WikiReader a couple of days ago, we arrived at the conclusion that perhaps the onrushing juggernaut towards ultimate convergence of handheld devices was perhaps not such a good thing.

Scott pointed out that the increasing bifurcation that I'd begun to notice in the development of the mobile web, where the iPhone and its attendent  media hype were misrepresenting what was really happening at the point where the social, the mobile and the web intersect. That instead of being obsessed with chasing after the ultimate singularity, the handheld device that even did your windows, we should instead be taking a leaf from the WikiReader and learn from what was happening at the bottom of the pyramid.

This little battery powered handheld device allows anyone to access Wikipedia, a free online resource. The device is affordable at $99, robust and only needs to be connected one in a while for updating the information contained therein. It could stand alone and work in any environment and did not need ICT infrastructure that many smarter devices do. Furthermore, teachers could not object to it in the classroom, unlike mobile phones, as it had no distractions like chatting, games or txt.

Such leaner, lighter products applications and services are being launched everyday in the developing (but highly advanced in their own way) markets of Kenya and India and South Africa, developed for the constraints and conditions of their operating environment. They require the minimum of resources and are changing the way businesses design their operations and address their pricing and cost strategies. They are the result of the influence of the vast underserved and overlooked markets at the BoP, a customer base whose most important characteristic is their high sensitivity to price, followed by variability of environmental conditions and uncertain infrastructure.

Should these lessons of designing products with maximum constraints and minimum resources be solely for these markets or could we, in fact, integrate them into the way products are developed for the top of the pyramid?  Is the glamour and glitz of developing for the ultimate smartphone - all of 34 million served - sucking the creative abilities of the best talent in the world into a blackhole of innovation that ultimately ends up focusing on 2% or 5% of an entire planet's population?