DiFi for All

The study aimed to go beyond surface-level insights into digital finance by embedding itself in people’s everyday financial lives. Understanding financial behaviours meant engaging with wider themes—employability, livelihoods, aspirations, mobility, anxiety, and trust. This approach helped reveal the intimate and context-specific ways in which people encounter and relate to digital finance.

As digital infrastructure grows in low- and middle-income countries, the promise of financial inclusion through digital platforms has become a key goal for governments, financial institutions, and development agencies. However, access alone does not guarantee meaningful use. Many first-time users struggle with poor agent practices, confusing interfaces, or unmet expectations. This project focused on the moment of onboarding—the first tangible interaction users have with DFS—as a pivotal moment that influences future engagement, satisfaction, and trust.

While access to mobile phones and digital platforms continues to expand, there remains a significant gap in understanding how users are introduced to these services and what happens in that crucial window of first interaction. DiFi for All set out to study this moment with ethnographic depth, offering insights that can inform more equitable, intuitive, and effective onboarding experiences.

Research Approach

Given the complexity of digital finance in everyday life, the research team adopted an immersive ethnographic method across a wide range of geographies and user types. The team designed and adapted field strategies that prioritised live onboarding—catching users as they were organically introduced to or interacting with digital financial platforms in real-time.

This required a sharp field sensitivity to observe non-staged, spontaneous user-agent interactions. Researchers embedded themselves in markets, rural community centres, agricultural sites, mobile money booths, and retail stores—anywhere onboarding could naturally take place. This strategy brought forward grounded insights about trust, hesitation, coercion, understanding, and agency at the point of onboarding.

Recruitment and Fieldwork

Recruitment was a continuous and creative effort. Given the diversity of users and the informal nature of many DFS interactions, researchers had to build local networks, snowball through referrals, and work with community leaders, service providers, NGOs, and grassroots organisations. Recruiting the right participants in the right context enabled the team to capture both breadth and depth: from first-time smartphone users in peri-urban Kenya to gig workers navigating mobile payments in Indonesia. A suite of ethnographic tools supported the study. Money maps, financial diaries, contextual probes, and open-ended interviews were used to unpack not just financial behaviours, but the emotional, social, and infrastructural scaffolding behind them. The goal was to understand what digital financial services meant to people, not only in functional terms, but also in how they altered relationships, mobility, and access.

Capturing ‘Thick’ Financial Lives

The project relied heavily on rich media documentation–photographs, video snippets, space mapping, gesture capture, and layered visual notes–to represent the qualitative fidelity of people’s financial lives. These were not just documentation tools, but also critical ways of analysing the spaces, artefacts, and emotional textures that defined people’s interaction with money and technology.

This form of immersive, thick research allowed the team to see patterns in onboarding experiences—who is welcomed in, who is left out, and what silent social cues or structural barriers shape this divide. The resulting insights went far beyond typical behavioural economics framing to include themes such as infrastructural trust, localised tech fluency, invisible gatekeeping by agents, and the performance of financial legitimacy. The DiFi for All study generated a deeply humanised understanding of the digital financial onboarding experience. It has since contributed to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s broader efforts in shaping financial inclusion strategies and agent network design. By demonstrating how onboarding is not merely a transactional step but a trust-building event, the study has helped shift institutional thinking toward more people-centric design in financial technologies. As digital finance continues to scale, this foundational research remains a critical reference point. It emphasises the importance of context, clarity, consent, and cultural relevance at the point of onboarding, advocating for systems that don’t just reach more people but work better for them.