Mobile Phone Financial Services

Process follow:We will follow the User-Centered design process as best we can – In the research phase, and also involving the same users in testing paper

prototypes of the concept and incorporating their input into the final designs.

About the Microfinance EcosystemWe need to visit various MFIs in urban and rural to find out how they’re organized and what their operational difficulties were. We need to be,

armed with a basic outline of questions gathered from literature studies from the web & interviews of various urban based NGO offices. Our

objective will be to ask as many open ended questions as possible and try to find out problem areas to focus on.

The Credit Officer

The Credit Officer on his daily collection round, as he visited each loan group at an agreed location in order to collect the weekly interest amounts,

determine individual & group prospects & hold meetings. We need to focus on the Credit Officer, and try to make his job of maintaining accounts

and keeping track of the groups easier.

A Credit officer schedules his visits a day in advance and visits 8-10 households in the 1st half of the day. Each of his visits take approximately 10-

15 minutes. He uses his motorbike to commute between collection centers.

On each of his visits he carries a receipt book and a personal record register, and copies the records from his personal register to the branch

officer ledger.

Scenario where our App would helpBased on our findings, we isolated key tasks that the Credit Officer performs, and came up with the Information architecture of the mobile

application to help him in his day-to-day duties. It would help him keep track of group’s accounts, collection points for the day’s schedule ang

group trainings / meetings.

 

Prototyping the application

We have created some selected screens from the application. For the final presentation, we will build a working interactive prototype of the

application using Java, and do a demo. Once the prototype is ready we will visit the MFIs, to get more insight into how the idea can be improved.