Wave Money
Evaluating a financial service operating at the intersection of digital upheaval, institutional mistrust, and betal nut sales.
Today, Wave Money is the largest digital bank in Myanmar with a network of 56,000 agents serving 17 million customers. When Wave launched in 2017 they faced several challenges in adapting the mobile financial technologies developed in Africa to a new community of customers with unique needs and values. So they hired us to help.
Part service design, part cultural exploration, our goal was to understand the Myanma people’s appetite for digital banking services, to evaluate the existing state of Wave’s service offering, and to develop concepts aimed at improving customer engagement.
Research
Wave delivers their banking services through a combination of digital and physical touchpoints: an app where customers manage and transfer their money and agents where customers can convert cash into digital currency. Our research aimed to evaluate both the physical and digital as well as the shifting cultural landscape around finances, banking, and digital literacy.
6 Weeks of Research & Synthesis
3 Townships: Yangon, Dala, & Taunte
53 Participants: 33 Customers, 10 Wave Reps, and 10 Stakeholders
As part of our research, we developed a set of journeys and personas, highlighting areas ripe for concepting.
Design
To deliver our findings we organized a workshop between Wave Money, Yoma Bank, and CGAP. This workshop allowed the team to share our findings in the context of a local tea shop while leveraging the cross-organizational experience and perspectives of all our stakeholders to develop a robust set of concepts.
After defining an initial set of concepts, we prototyped and tested two: Out of Office and Wake-Up Call. Following the successful pilot of both concepts the approaches were integrated into Wave’s operation.
Concept: Out Of Office
A week-long sprint-style research protocol centered around 2-days of in-field interviews and activities. This repeatable, immersive research format was geared toward answering a specific question or testing an idea, utilizing a limited amount of time and resources. With the OoO format, the team quickly developed a research plan, recruited participants, executed the research, synthesized the results, and conveyed their findings (and the implications of those findings) internally to the Wave team.
Concept: Wake-Up Call
Wake-Up Call utilized Wave’s existing call center infrastructure and retooled it as a high-touchpoint educational platform. The Wake-Up Call process leveraged existing customer usage patterns (business intelligence) as a foundation for targeted outreach. The format incorporated new game-like interactions with customers, incentivizing hands-on use of the service over passive education.
My Role
I was the project lead, on the ground in Yangon throughout the duration of the project. It was my job to train Wave’s team, coordinate with local fixers, plan and execute the research, synthesize the data collected, edit photos, generate insights, plan the workshop, develop and pilot our concepts, and deliver the final reports.
Partners
