1 in 5 Americans is excluded from formal credit

Solution

CICO integrates existing practices around receiving and sending money in informal groups with current technology, ensuring secure transfers, clear accountability chain, and flexible re-payments.

Flexible Payments

Record payments in different modalities, like checks, ACH, cash, venmo/zelle.
Pay any amount, allowing for personalized micropayments or paying a loan in full at any time.

Make-your-loan

Start a loan specifying amount, interest rate, repayment schedule, and preferred modes of repayment. Both lenders and lendees can record loans, which will be entered into the system upon confirmation from both parties.

Dynamic Amortization Schedule

Dynamic amortization schedule table updates based on user payment frequency. Receive guidance without the need to stick to the generated schedule.

Research and Discovery

Family and friends are the first stop to finances

We conducted storytelling sessions of 2 hours with 20 individuals representing the target market population (unbanked or underbanked Americans) to understand their behaviors around finances and collocate them on the spectrum of behavioral dimensions relevant to this project.

Individual perceptions around finances result in tension and lack of transparency

Observing people in real life allowed us to create hypotheses on their ingrained patterns, and generate two personas to represent our prospective customer base.

People save and store money outside of formal institutions in groups

Group dynamics are a crucial aspect of financial movements outside of formal institutions. People use tools like ledgers, agendas, or spreadsheets to create accountability, and make decision on the flow of money based on trust. Available digital platforms require bank accounts, or do not support users throughout the entire process of loaning or receiving money informally.

Prototyping and Development

Secure technology streamlines existing informal financial rituals

We designed a prototype with security as a top priority. We modeled the language and interactions on users' existing mental models around finances, promoting group action and trust-building by design.

I developed a usable prototype for CICO in the form of an open-source, dockerized web application (using HTML/ CSS/Javascript, Keycloack for security and authorization, and MySQL for data management) which TOCA deployed to test the concept of CICO with a group of users.