The Centrality of Cash

In Jordan, cash is vastly preferred over other means of payment in respondents’ daily lives. That said, the Jordanians who the research team interviewed each acknowledged the inherent drawbacks that came with carrying cash.

“I’m used to carrying around cash, but it still worries me when I do.”—Rema, 64, F, convenience store owner

For Rema, one of the first respondents the team interviewed, when it came time in the two-hour interview to broadly discuss whether she ever imagined somehow storing money on her phone, her reaction was quick: “No, never.” The team let the answer stand, with the lead interviewer looping back to discuss it in more depth after Rema had had the chance to see some of the stimuli the team had arrived with, and that she was encouraged to indulge in the not-yet-possible. When re-asked in a similar way, Rema replied: “Yes, I could see storing money on my phone, but I would want to put it in myself, and then I would want to be able to have the cash [be dispensed directly out] of the phone whenever I wanted.”

While technically infeasible, Rema’s design requirement spoke to both her dedication to and comfort with cash, as well as her lack of trust in being able to invisibly “send” her money to someone or somewhere else using only her phone. Rather, when she needed money stored on her phone, she would have preferred to dial in the amount required and then hand the physical cash to the recipient. Whatever this sort of object might be called, one certainty was that it certainly did not behave like any wallet (or “e-wallet”) that the research team had ever heard of.

The high standards Rema held for her digital device to hypothetically function as a means of storing and safely carrying physical cash stood out to the team, and from that early interview, the research team made it a key component of subsequent interviews to explore precisely what it was about cash that made people reluctant to put it in one of the several “e-wallets” offered by Jordan’s mobile network operators.

The Importance of In-Person Interaction, and the Connection to Wastah

As the research team explored Jordanians’ preference for cash more deeply in subsequent interviews, it became clear that cash was something that, for all of its perceived risks and weaknesses, was important for bringing people together, into the same time and place, to physically exchange value (Maurer, 2013). The comfort with cash seemed to go part and parcel with people’s preference for in-person interactions with their friends and shopkeepers.

Rema, the woman who would have preferred to place money “into her phone” provided she could print it out directly from the phone at her convenience, shared with the research team how she enjoyed the act of repaying her loan in person at the bank branch. When the team probed into what she enjoyed about the journey to the local branch, both a time- and effort-consuming act for a 64-year-old woman suffering from mobility issues, she said, “they’re my friends [at the branch], and I enjoy speaking with them. It wouldn’t be the same to just use a phone [to repay a microloan].”

As the team asked subsequent respondents about this topic, they learned more about the relationships formed through the in-person interactions and exchanges of money and favors, and how they helped build what respondents referred to as wastah. Building up one’s wastah, or ‘personal connections,’ are ways that respondents make the various processes of daily life work more easily for them. For Wafa, a 39-year-old hairdresser, when referring to the local NMB branch where she made her repayments, she did not use the phrase ‘bank branch,’ instead specifically referring by name to Noor, the teller who she sought out each time she visited the bank. Each interaction contributed to building her wastah with Noor, and if there was ever a mistake or misunderstanding, “I can show up in person and yell about it!” Likewise, if Noor (or one of her friends) ever needed a last-minute haircut appointment, Wafa would go through whatever pains necessary to arrange one.

Besides cash being useful to build wastah between those people exchanging it, the physical nature of cash also helped people underscore the seriousness of what they were committing to, such as when Mohammed, a 36 year-old car mechanic from Amman, shared that while he would be open to the idea of using his phone to help repay his microloan,

“If I were ever to loan money to a friend, I wouldn’t trust using a phone to do it. I’d want to make the loan using cash, so that I could look [my friend] in the eyes as I handed them the money… [this interaction] shows it is important to both of you, that [this personal loan] is a serious matter.”—Mohammed, 36, M, mechanic

The flip side of this recurring theme of reliance on cash was an aversion to almost every other form of storing value, including debit and credit cards issued by commercial banks and phone-based “e-wallets” offered by Jordan’s three main telecom providers: Zain, Umniah, and Orange.

The main driver for the lack of trust of credit cards originated from either firsthand negative experiences or secondhand stories about banks “tricking” customers who had used such cards. Mohammed, the car mechanic from Amman, shared a story of how he used his credit card to withdraw cash multiple times from various ATM’s over the course of a day while he ran various errands. He learned at the end of that month that he’d run up significant fees on that day for reasons he did not understand, and promptly threw his credit card into the discarded motor oil-powered furnace that he used to heat his car repair shop.

To underscore the country’s reliance upon cash, while the research team was in Jordan, Amman was one of the few cities in the world where Uber was piloting allowing riders to pay a driver for a ride using cash instead of with a credit card linked to the app (as with almost everywhere else in the world). Although credit cards were technically available in Jordan, relatively few Jordanians chose to have one (compared to the 55% of Americans who are credit-card holders). (Statista.com, 2018)

The Familiarity of Community Savings Clubs

One common ‘financial product’ that had roots going back into ancient history was the ‘community savings club’. A group of typically between eight and twelve people (most often women, according to NMB/EPAM Continuum’s field research) would meet each month and all the members would pool their money to pay a set, small sum to one of the members. The group would rotate who receives each month’s total payment until all members had been a recipient of the group’s pool of multiple small payments, at which point they would decide whether to start over. For the respondents the research team interviewed, there was no interest accrued on the sum they received from the other members of the group, and the savings clubs functioned primarily as means of beating participants’ temptation to spend, and building wastah between the participants.

Multiple respondents also liked the idea of money ‘staying in the community,’ rather than going to an ‘outside’ entity like a bank (even if they trusted the bank’s employees, brand, and process). Feda, a merchant who was the head of her community savings club, when asked to compare the experience of repaying a microloan to making a payment into her community savings club, described the latter as a “reverse loan,” saying: “When I make a repayment for my savings club, I feel good because I know it will be coming back to me later. When I repay NMB, I feel sad because I know [the money] is going ‘away’ from me.”

With her savings clubs, Feda felt there was less pressure for her to invest in a productive asset that would bring financial returns, because participating in savings clubs did not incur any interest charges. Savings clubs made Feda feel more comfortable choosing to invest in non-productive assets like gold.

The Challenges of Distance

The team’s research also revealed differences between rural and urban dwellers when it came to how they actually repaid. For some rural microloan customers, the nearest bank branch might be 45 minutes away by car. If the microloan customer did not own or have easy access to a vehicle, to travel such a great distance meant either waiting on the side of the road and trying to catch a ride into town with a passing driver (while carrying the entirety of one’s loan repayment with them in cash), scheduling transportation to the bank branch (which could cost significant monetary or social capital), or giving one’s loan repayment amount and bank ID card to a (hopefully sufficiently) trustworthy friend who was headed into town and trust that they would stop to make the repayment at the bank branch on the client’s behalf.

Even for urban dwellers, who typically lived closer to the bank, making repayments at the branch could still be a costly or troublesome endeavor. For Maha, a food seller who suffered from back problems after decades of working over a stove, her lack of mobility meant she would have to take a relatively expensive 4 dinar (~US $5.50) taxi ride both to and from the bank branch each month for the times when only option was repaying in person herself. Over time, she picked up workarounds for this expense, including calling her daughter who lived nearby to come and take the repayment to the bank for her, or giving the repayment to her downstairs neighbor, who is an NMB employee, for him to carry with him to work and repay on her behalf.

Cultural Affordances in Practice

Upon arriving back in Milan studio from Jordan to begin the analysis and sensemaking process, the research team printed out, rewrote, and delved into the thousands of discrete pieces of data that they had gathered over the dozens of hours spent in conversation and observation in people’s homes and businesses (Madsbjerg, 2014). In doing so, the team sought to understand peoples’ lives broadly, but were particularly interested in what shaped financial behavior, how that translated those behaviors and beliefs into their relationship with NMB, and how that influenced whether they repaid their microloan. Looking across all sixteen respondents’ lives, the team sought to understand the innate behaviors and motivations that drove some to consistently make their monthly repayments and not others. The research team’s goal at the end of this two-week phase was to identify strong themes that appeared across conversations and throughout the research, and then invite the core NMB team members to Milan for a several-day workshop where the EPAM Continuum team would introduce the themes and explain the observations that each was drawn from, based upon what the combined team members observed together while immersed in in-context conversations and observation across Jordan. From there, attendees would work together to transform the observed themes into actionable opportunities with which to move forward into the Envisioning and Prototyping phase.

To start, the EPAM Continuum team began by examining the relationship between respondents’ financial lives and their digital lives. All respondent households that the researchers visited owned at least one cellphone, a multifaceted object that played roles in people’s lives ranging from entertainment to communication. During each interview, the research team brought up a local mobile money service offered by the country’s largest mobile network operator, Zain, that allowed one to store money on one’s phone after having deposited it at a local Zain shop. None of the sixteen respondents interviewed had ever used the service (nor had most heard of anyone who had), and the majority of respondents dismissed such a service as either unnecessary (“I’ve already got one wallet that I carry, why do I need another in my phone?”) or risky, as respondents cited fears of losing their cellphone, or children breaking a phone as they played with it, or a child accidentally giving away all of their money (as phones were often shared household devices, as with many other countries where mobile phones were still an emerging phenomenon) (Von Bayer, 2017). Respondents vastly preferred their physical wallets (and the cash inside of it) over a phone-based “e-wallet” (a term used by Jordan’s three primary mobile networks), particularly when compared with their current money storage solutions, which included hiding money under their mattress or storing it at a trusted relative or neighbor’s home to keep it safe from immediate family members looking to spend it. The research team found that this analog approach to saving money spoke to a more familiar mental model for respondents (Young, 2011).

One strong theme that emerged across the lives of those who reliably repaid their microloans monthly was their reliance upon a common object: a hassalah (the Jordanian equivalent of a piggy bank). Whether in the form of plastic-molded orbs with a slot for money, or aluminum cans wrapped with adhesive paper covered in colorful anime cartoons, hassalah were key enablers of the most successful microloan customers’ repayments, as they helped build and enforce regimented, daily microsaving. These objects were universally recognizable, and of the four respondents the research team interviewed who ran small convenience stores, all of them sold various shapes and sizes of hassalah.

Although the phone was equally ubiquitous in Jordanians’ daily lives, its open-ended and fast-evolving role stood in sharp contrast with the static, focused utility of the hassalah. Seeing the pivotal role hassalah played in many Jordanians’ social practice of saving money, the research team considered whether and how to incorporate the hassalah into the service they were designing in the form of a “cultural affordance.” John Payne, Co-founder and Managing Director of Moment Design, coined the phrase “cultural affordance” to describe a “culturally specific, iconographic image” that connects a new offering in a market to a familiar, pre-existing set of social practices by associating the novel offering with objects and ideas that are already embedded within people’s daily lives and behaviors (Payne, 2015). Designed properly, cultural affordances ground an unfamiliar new product or service within familiar mental models.

The EPAM Continuum team believed that the hassalah, reframed as a cultural affordance within the new service, could be a powerful behavior-changing force for explaining the value of the novel new service to Jordanians. The team hoped it would link to a behavior of saving money to repay microloans, which respondents said they aspired to but found difficulty doing. The team believed that a new service which adopted the mental model of a hassalah on one’s phone would speak more meaningfully to microloan customers than that of an “e-wallet”. The team’s hope for the following Envisioning and Prototyping phase was to test whether NMB’s microloan customers would react differently to a service that worked more like a hassalah (an object designed to help people save money) rather than a wallet (an object designed to help people carry and spend money).

While the team hoped to change how NMB’s customers thought about storing money on their phones through shifting their mental model from phone as “e-wallet” to phone as “e-hassalah,” they wanted to preserve as much as possible the set of human behaviors that enabled the familiarity and centrality of wastah that was so central to many NMB customers. EPAM Continuum’s proposed service prototype sought to strike the balance between simplifying the microloan repayment process through a digital element, while at the same time letting customers continue to broaden and deepen the wastah enabled by in-person exchanges of money and generosity.