Money, Decisions, and Control: Building Digital Financial Services That Help Poor Customers Cope and Strategize

In this paper, the authors present a model of human decision-making that can be used to design future financial services. The purpose of this model is to collate a wide variety of observed financial practices of the privileged and the poor into a common framework that can be applied in different contexts.

The paper is divided into two sections. It first describes the model for financial decision-making. It then uses the model to assess the present state of financial services and offer a series of design principles and recommendations emerging from the model. These applications and principles are intended for financial services providers, and indeed any innovators of the future, who want to design financial services that are intuitive and adaptive to a wide variety of customer segments, and especially the low-income majority who are currently underserved.