By ADAM IHUCHA,
Arusha---
Claire Prince-Josh, a bank-marketing executive for more than a decade at
horticultural potential area in Meru, Arusha region, is struggling to sell her financial
service at the moment and does not understand why.
As she strives to push her products
the more it becomes tough, frustrating her, deciding to design a new service on
addition to other tradition ones that seem to be losing allure to customers.
As it happened, she went back
to the drawing board and devised the car loan product and later on spends a lot
of bank’s money to promote the new financial product, only to find that the
service too is not moving at all.
A fortnight ago, she lost her
job for misleading the bank to invest substantial amount of money for
introducing undesirable product.
Ms Claire is not alone. In the digital
economy, most people find it difficult to sell enough of their product or
service because they create offers that vaguely serve the market and seem like
a pretty good idea.
Why? Most of experts
naturally suffer from the ‘curse of knowledge’ as they tend to assume they know
what their potential customers need, but in reality this could be far from the
truth.
Raymond John Himatia, horticultural growers in
Usa-River area in Meru, where Ms Claire was formerly working, says that they
are real hungry for a long-term loan for agri-business expansion and not car
credit.
“Should the bank asks us what we need, we could
tell them, give us long term loans for agricultural expansion…this would be suitable
for us” Mr Raymond noted.
A three-day event in Arusha dubbed
‘FinDisrupt’ that
brought together product development teams among financial service providers as
well as researchers in the financial sector and tech developers in Tanzania as
well as end users, realized that financial products in most cases are designed
on boardrooms or copied from elsewhere like Europe or Asia.
No wonder, in 2009, 56.0 percent of adults had no access to any kind of
financial services; 12.4 percent used banks accounts; 4.3 had access to
semi-formal services like SACCOs; and 27.3 percent used only informal services
like rotating savings and credit associations.
After intense discussion, it
was evident that financial service developers, now than ever before, need to
change their mindset when it comes to design financial products.
Ibanga Umanah, Co Founder
Brave Venture Labs at San Fransisco says that to win customers, it is
imperative to come up with human centered products.
“Human centered design
is a process for understanding people and designing solutions to their problems”
Dr Umanah explained.
Although, institutions such as Financial Sector Deepening Trust
(FSDT), the world Bank, the National Bureau of Statistics and a number of
market research firms among others, generate insights on the demand side of the
financial sector, the response from the market, but new products does not give
the confidence that the insights generated are being used for the improvement
and development of new innovative products.
It
was from this background, FSDT decided to ignite a conversation on consumer
centered product development in order to fill the product improvement and
development gap in Tanzania.
According
to FSDT operations director, Ms Irene Mlola the FinDisrupt event took the shape of a hackathon.
In the early stages of
hackathons, computer programmers
and others involved in software development and hardware development, including
graphic designers, interface designers and project managers, collaborate
intensively on software project.
Hackathons
offer a unique space and opportunity
for idea proliferation and project realization.
“We
particularly
invited few end users to give us feedback on whether financial service
developers have built products that meet their needs after the finDisrupt
event” Ms Mlola.
Indeed,
the event started conversation
from the exciting evidence or insights of the end users. This came directly
from both FSDT / FSP reports or through further analysis.
These insights were used in the generation of new ideas, which
resulted in tweaking of exciting products or in the development of new
products.
The main objective of FinDisrupt was to promote evidence based decision-making
in product development by financial service providers in Tanzania.
In most cases, the product development teams are at the heart of
tweaking international products cascaded to them by their mother companies /
improving exciting products and in a few cases they are involved in the
development of new products.
“In order to shake up the financial products development space
in Tanzania, this is the group which we would like to influence and work with
post the event” chipped in Mr Elvis Mushi, FSDT Head of research.
These include product development teams from mobile network
operators (MNOs) banks, microfinance institutions such as saccoss, Insurance
Companies and Pension funds.
Financial Sector Deepening (FSDT) mission is to
generate sustainable improvements in the livelihoods of poor households through
reduced vulnerability to shocks increased incomes and employment achieved
through providing greater access to financial services for more men, women and
enterprises.
FSDT in partnership with the Bank of Tanzania
defines financial inclusion as a state where: “All Tanzanians regularly use financial tools
and payment platforms to manage cash flows and mitigate shocks. These are delivered
by formal providers through a range of appropriate services and infrastructure,
with dignity and fairness”.
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