Title: Digital Financial Services and the Impacts of Gender and Learnability on Adoption
Advisors: Richard Anderson and Kurtis Heimerl
Abstract:
Worldwide, two billion people remain unbanked, the majority of whom reside in resource-constrained environments. While banks have limited reach due to high overhead costs of physical expansion, the global increase in mobile penetration has created opportunities to serve the unbanked using mobile-based Digital Financial Services (DFS). However, there are many factors that affect the understanding, adoption, and use of DFS including learnability of the systems and gender of the users.
In this talk, we discuss ways in which previous exposure or domain knowledge improve learnability, and we recommend that metrics for learnability should include effectiveness and help sought, independent of usability. We also identify DFS adoption opportunities such as user readiness, interface improvements, and women's independence. We also discuss the role of gendered barriers in the readiness for and adoption of Digital Financial Services (DFS) and the impact of gendered roles in curtailing or enhancing the same. We present our analysis of the affordances or, lack thereof, in affordability of funds, the authority of transactions, access to technological devices, and agency of social and cultural mobility--all of which are prerequisites to fully utilizing DFS.