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Approach
Segmentation
The Human Account is a segmentation that provides rigorous data,
deep qualitative insights, and a holistic framework for understanding people’s financial lives.
It unlocks the stories of the globes’ most underserved customers and reveals opportunities for financial service providers to create better, more relevant products for these untapped markets.
Three-dimensional framework
To better understand these emerging customer markets
and people’s financial lives, we developed a three-dimensional
research framework, revealing the contextual, behavioral, and psychological dimensions of their financial lives.
Understanding of people grounded in financial health
We grounded our approach to customer segmentation in the concept of financial health, recognizing that it enables us to generate a more realistic and actionable understanding of financial lives than is possible using a product or inclusion lens.
A THREE-DIMENSIONAL FRAMEWORK
PSYCHOLOGY
BEHAVIOR
CONTEXT
CONTEXT
What are the socioeconomic characteristics of my users?
Age, gender, household
context, education, sources
and amount of income, and
asset ownership
BEHAVIOR
How do my users act?
How individuals plan and
prioritize their finances,
shape income and expenses,
build reserves, and cultivate receivables
PSYCHOMETRIC
Why do my users act as they do?
People's sense of control,
self-efficacy, openness, trust, optimism, conscientiousness,
and dependability
Why go beyond financial inclusion
and start with financial health?
We believe products and services designed to strengthen people’s financial health are more salient and valuable in the eyes of customers, expand markets and ultimately maximize customer lifetime value for providers, and are more likely to drive the human development outcomes we seek.
People are financially healthy when they are able to use financial tools and strategies to effectively and consistently to:
resilient in
the face of
financial shocks
meet their
basic needs
cultivate
financial and economic opportunities
Process & Methods
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concept of financial health, recognizing that it enables us to generate a more realistic and actionable understanding of financial lives than is possible using a product or inclusion lens.
PHASE 1: HUMAN-CENTERED DESIGN RESEARCH
How can we ground the data
in a deeper understanding of
people's real lives and behavior?
A key differentiator of this work is its integration of methods from multiple research and analysis traditions—such as human-centered design (HCD), cognitive psychology, behavioral science, and large scale survey-based market research.
Initial HCD was crucial for understanding the context of people's financial lives, including their challenges, aspirations, strategies, and personalities. Through this research, we developed models for understanding people's financial lives and identified key contextual, behavioral, and psychological variables for measurement in subsequent national surveys. Using this structured and comprehensive HCD-research, our integrated team of researchers, designers, and strategists produced explanatory models, robust user profiles, and our segmentation survey instrument. These profiles provided an unprecedented in-depth look at participant's financial lives that grounded our data analysis and brought our segments to life.
The design of the foundational HCD research included many activities, from household financial mapping to scenario-based provocations. The learning agenda was:
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Contextual elements that shape financial lives
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Deeply felt needs driving behaviors and strategies
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Financial behaviors and strategies that people deploy in pursuit of financial health
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Psychological characteristics that underpin people's values, preferences, and financial decisions
HCD Research
PHASE 2: SURVEY DESIGN
How can a survey capture a more holistic picture of people's context, behavior, and psychology?
We created a global survey tool that comprises of contextual, behavioral, and psychometric variables. Each survey was adapted to country contexts, including local nuance on media, cultural norms, and financial service provider input. We used a rigorous, stratified sampling method to achieve a nationally representative pool.
Our instrument includes contextual questions that go beyond demographics, for example exploring financial decision making roles within households, and examines financial behaviors beyond the use of products and services, including people's financial priorities and plans. Our psychometrics draw from academically proven survey questions and experimental questions we designed. All were tested and refined by the Busara Center for Behavioral Economics to ensure fit for emerging market contexts.
Survey Design
PHASE 3: NATIONAL SURVEYING & DATA COLLECTION
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Data Collection
PHASE 4: MIXED METHODS SEGMENTATION ANALYSIS
What are the most insightful relationships for categorizing and predicting people's behavior?
To identify the segments in each country we used data analytics and behavioral and decision making models we developed through human-centered design research.
We identified clusters with similar characteristics based on K-medoids approach, which groups respondents based on common survey responses. We used our contextual, behavioral, and psychological models to interpret descriptive and regression analysis of each cluster, thereby surfacing and describing segments.
We then overlaid profiles of representative individuals from each segment that we developed through in-depth HCD interviews to enrich the segment with real world examples.
Cluster Analysis
a preliminary algorithmic sorting based on common survey responses
Analysis
PHASE 5: PROTOTYPING AND DESIGN
How can we tailor offerings
to better support people's
varied lives and experiences?
The ultimate goal of this work is to ensure that the insights garnered from segmentation inform real-world work of financial service providers, policy makers, regulators, and development actors.
These stories, statistics, and insights are starting points.
They should complement tailored research and inform design and investment decisions. As such, each of the segments include: insights, opportunities, product, channel, and messaging design principles.
For India and Kenya we also developed a set of segment-specific, white label product concepts.
Our data can be used in a variety of ways by development actors and financial services providers:
DEVELOPMENT ACTORS
Expansion of our research to other development sectors
Use our approach to test the impact of development programs on individual's context, behavior, attitudes, and financial health.
Evaluating impact on development interventions
Use our data and approach to better understand other areas of interest such as gender, agriculture, and entrepreneurship
FINANCIAL SERVICE PROVIDERS
Segment-aligned digital financial products
Develop products that speak to the needs, aspirations, behaviors, and personalities of segments (e.g. by combining information on segments with a HCD sprint).
Rapid Customer Intelligence
A mini-questionnaire to rapidly segment existing users to deepen customer insights and improve design and uptake.
Data Matching
Match our data with call records and transaction data of mobile network operators to learn how different segments are using each provider's products and services.
Prototyping
Next Steps
PHASE 6: NEXT STEPS
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