With 65,000 clients, 30 branches, and 350 employees, the National Microfinance Bank of Jordan (NMB) is the third-largest micro-financial institution in the country. The bank dispenses microloans—typically between $100 and $5,000—to credit-poor customers that the average commercial bank would overlook.
Our client had heard from regional branches that repayment was a major painpoint. Some rural loan customers would spend a significant amount of time and money arranging for travel to the branch to make monthly repayments, while others would entrust money for their loan repayment to a friend or relative traveling into town, trusting they would responsibly repay on their behalf.
NMB, in partnership with USAID, asked us to help reimagine their repayment experience.
Jordan is a country of approximately 10 million people with Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Palestine as its neighbors. Estimates are that between 15-20% of Jordanians have formal bank accounts, and while national literacy statistics are high according to UNICEF, local NMB branch managers reported anecdotally that a community’s level of illiteracy (to the extent that customers needed guidance from a bank employee or friend) could be as high as 50%. While 95% of Jordanians own cellphones, only 38% of those phones are smartphones. Jordan is a cash-based society, and there is a pervasive mistrust of all forms of money besides cash. (Uber operates in Jordan, but the country is one of the few places in the world where the service accepts cash payments).
We conducted generative needfinding research into microloan clients’ loan process through 16 in-home interviews across a five different towns, and interviewed bank employees in each location.
Phase One Deliverables: · Full-color, bound book of debriefings from customer interviews, with actionable insights and frameworks from analysis of customer and employee interviews
We designed and prototyped an entirely new loan repayment service, testing it with 12 current microloan clients in retail stores across four different locations across urban and rural areas.
Phase Two Deliverables: · On-device smartphone prototype (using Invision) of future loan repayment experience · Paper non-smartphone prototype of future loan repayment experience · Narrated “wireframe walkthrough” (using Keynote) to guide stakeholders through how the digital and physical service elements worked together
→ Developed screener and managed recruitment of 28 qualitative interview respondents (16 generative in-home interviews in Phase One, 12 evaluative service prototype interviews in Phase Two) → Recruited fixer/translator and local guide for field research guidance and coordination → Designed interview stimuli and interview flow that accounts for and respects respondents with limited literacy → Designed separate prototype protocols and stimuli for respondents with both smartphones and feature phones → Managed the translation process of both research stimuli and smartphone wireframes from English into Arabic → Assisted with editorial design and creative direction for printed book → Responsible for capturing key highlights in debriefing documents following each interview → Helped design wireframes for the smartphone app prototype (using Adobe Illustrator) → Conceived of both in-home ethnographic and physical prototype research approaches (questions, sequencing, activities/exercises) → Linked prototype screens together to create a “wireframe walkthrough”, demonstrating the flow of the app to the client (using Keynote) → Designed presentations, helped plan and co-run client workshops, and co-ran the final client presentation to the board of directors of the bank and the Central Bank of Jordan
A respondent sorts through our Arabic-language stimuli of “idea cards” describing possible ways of improving clients’ microloan experience
A close-up of one of our “idea cards”, a way of letting customers spend their microloan without the risk of personally carrying/storing cash
While 95% of Jordanians own cellphones, only 38% of those phones are smartphones, presenting an interesting challenge for prototyping
Link to the wireframe walkthrough I created out of our prototype, verbally and visually annotating our wireframes for less technologically inclined stakeholders
Our proposed service reimagined the loan repayment process in two fundamental ways - flexibility in repayment location, and flexibility in repayment amount/time - ****as enabled by the e-hassalah. The app overcomes two significant challenges faced by Jordanian consumers: distance and discipline. Letting people repay their loans at local merchants’ shops solves the challenge of distance by saving customers the inconvenience of traveling to the bank. Allowing customers to repay in small amounts over the course of the month (rather than in one lump sum) offers them a way to save money towards their loan repayment gradually by transferring their funds into an online piggybank (the “e-hassalah”) visible on their phones.
NMB’s clients can’t easily travel to physical bank branches to repay each month. Our service reimagined trusted local merchants’ shops as repayment points, obviating the need for clients to travel to branches to repay, with local clients’ repayments kept at the merchant’s shop until an NMB is sent to retrieve it.
