Stakeholders

Figure 1. Visual summary of intersecting stakeholder goals. Image © EPAM Continuum, used with permission.

The novelty of an ethnographic approach to understanding people and the use of human-centered design, combined with the significant promise of the project’s result (if the aspirations laid out in the proposal were realized) meant that there was a significant amount of both interest and expectation from all of the major involved client parties, of which there were four:

First, the leadership of NMB, which included the General Manager of NMB, the Regional Manager and Head of Non-Financial Services, and the Head of IT, all wanted evidence of the bank’s customer-centricity to show the non-profit donors they worked with that they kept their customers in the forefront of their minds. To further raise the stakes, both the Regional Manager and Head of Non-Financial Services as well as the Head of IT were personally involved with the project, and saw the smooth execution of both the process and the result as partially within their responsibility. From the EPAM Continuum team’s initial meeting with him, the General Manager wanted “something that could sit on his desk” as proof that the bank had done strong, foundational work to understand what their customers wanted. Speaking broadly, these leaders wanted a successful project to yield a competitive new offering, but part and parcel with that, they were also concerned with good “optics” and positive PR for the organization.

Secondly, EPAM Continuum’s primary internal client, Felipe Cabezas, the bank’s Product Development Consultant, wanted the project to be a successful reflection of the bank’s body of work with non-profit donors (and in particular the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the main sponsor of the project). In addition to this “organizational” aspiration for the engagement, on a “personal” level, NMB’s Cabezas also wanted to further build his skills with the human-centered design process as applied to a complex business challenge.

Thirdly, the donor funding this project, USAID, was just as interested in a successful result for the project as they were in obtaining the proper sequence and collection of reports and artifacts that would enable them to prove to any external oversight committees that the services they had paid EPAM Continuum to render (problem identification, user research, designing wireframes, prototyping a service) and NMB to implement had been fully carried out. Ideally this engagement would also serve as a reflection of the good use to which their funding went, in the event USAID were to request more. At the minimum, USAID wanted proper accountability for tax and auditing standards, and this meant requiring the EPAM Continuum team to fill out and submit a variety of forms, along with examples of the work that was conducted in each project phase. In addition, the NMB/EPAM Continuum team discovered that, upon attending a meeting at USAID on the morning of their second day in the country that they were also expected to have a USAID representative accompany the team to an interview to be able to witness the ethnographic interview process firsthand.

Fourthly, the project team also experienced the somewhat unexpected addition of another critical stakeholder partway through the project: The Central Bank of Jordan (CBJ). The NMB leadership had been in touch with senior officials at the CBJ from the start of EPAM Continuum’s fieldwork, and on a day without interviews scheduled the core project team (consisting of the Head of Non-Financial Services, the Head of IT, Felipe Cabezas and the entire EPAM Continuum team) traveled to the Central Bank Building to meet with the Executive Manager for Payment Systems & Domestic Banking Operations and Financial Inclusion Department. Once there, NMB’s Head of Non-Financial Services presented the progress of the work to date, after which Stefano Bianchini, the EPAM Continuum team’s lead Service Designer and the manager of the project, shared some of the photos from fieldwork and introduced the core ideas behind human-centered design that the team had been employing to date in the project. The CBJ representative was very enthusiastic about both the goal of the project and the novel (for this context) methodology the EPAM Continuum team was using to carry out the work, and wanted to figure out how to have some of her employees gain exposure to the methods of human-centered design as it was being practiced by the project team.

Balancing and ensuring that the day-to-day activities of the project team satisfied the diverse needs of these stakeholders was a consistent point of focus for Bianchini as he tried simultaneously to protect the integrity of EPAM Continuum’s process and ensure that stakeholders all felt acknowledged.

NMB’s Past Innovations

Even before its collaboration with EPAM Continuum, NMB had a record of innovation that had set it ahead of its competitors in its ability to serve clients. When the EPAM Continuum team initially spoke with the Regional Manager/Head of Non-Financial Services and the Head of IT, they did not frame their innovations in terms of human-centered design, but rather in terms of the bank’s internal metrics, like capturing market share and processing clients’ microloan applications more quickly. The RfP highlighted a previous tech-led effort, the use of tablets by loan officers to collect loan application information from clients at their homes, instead of clients having to gather documents and travel to a branch to fill out an application. The NMB team was understandably proud that this had, as outlined in the current RfP, “decreased the application-to-disbursal period from 72 to less than 24 hours – freeing up resources to allow loan officers to serve 10 to 15 percent more clients.” In the EPAM Continuum team’s early conversations with these two NMB employees and Cabezas, NMB’s Product Development Consultant, the EPAM Continuum team encountered an unspoken tension; while the two full-time NMB employees spoke of NMB being the first microfinance banks in Jordan to employ tellers in their branches instead of making customers repay their microloans at other bank branches (an advancement that NMB’s competition soon copied), the RfP seemed to highlight NMB’s recent technology offerings as a means of obviating the need for as many human employees in favor of relying more upon technology.

Having already leveraged mobile technology to realize efficiencies around the microloan application process and broaden their client base, NMB’s leadership decided that the next natural step would be to focus on the other key part of the microloan process from the bank’s perspective: repayment. While repayment rates were satisfactory overall, the bank’s leadership wanted to understand why some microloan customers consistently repaid on time, while others (sometimes in nearly identical circumstances) struggled to do the same. Furthermore, through initial conversations, these variations in repayment rates did not appear to strongly correlate to geography or branch location, loan type, household size, or other metrics that NMB’s leadership had previously considered when deciding how to plan a new effort to improve operations. By gaining a deeper understanding of the factors that influenced how people repaid, NMB’s leadership hoped the EPAM Continuum team could design and test a solution that solved for the root causes of what prevented struggling microloan customers from repaying on time. Without a more nuanced understanding of the factors influencing repayment, NMB’s fast-expanding share of the microloan market could turn from an asset into a vulnerability; too many loans to clients unable to repay could over-leverage the bank and place it in a vulnerable position.

Identifying and Mapping the “NMB Microloan Journey”

In planning out the methods and stimuli for interviews, the NMB/EPAM Continuum team had to create an interview where respondents felt comfortable, so that respondents could share honestly about their past and current microloan experiences and give candid feedback on the various sketches of low-fidelity ideas the research team presented.

To familiarize themselves with the loan process, the EPAM Continuum team spoke via teleconference with the three core members of the NMB team, interviewing them in depth about all details and stages of the loan process in their eyes: how people typically discovered NMB’s services (most often word-of-mouth, or a referral from a friend or relative); the part of the loan process people complained about most (needing to provide two references on a loan application, various identifying documents, and proof of their income as shown on a bank statement); the reasons people most often provided for why they couldn’t successfully make a repayment on a given month (unanticipated expenditure wiping out money they’d saved up for their repayment); and more questions aimed at trying to uncover the “human side” of an NMB microloan without the benefit of being on the ground to discover microloan customers’ most pressing painpoints through firsthand ethnographic inquiry.

Through these interviews, the EPAM Continuum team came up with the six high-level steps that made up the loan journey:

1. “I realize I need a loan”
2. “I research the best options”
3. “I sign up for my loan”
4. “I get the money I need”
5. “I make my repayments”
6. “I make my final repayment”

The EPAM Continuum team consciously chose a “first-person” framing for the journey steps, because even though initially this made speaking about the steps somewhat cumbersome, it also forced both EPAM Continuum and NMB team members to acknowledge the highly personal nature of getting a loan, and the individuality of each journey.

After receiving approval and buy-in around this as a valid way to break down the microloan process from NMB stakeholders, the EPAM Continuum team adopted this as their general frame for thinking about all potential new ideas, offerings, and processes going forward.