The fabulous Dawn Walter recently interviewed me for her Anthropology & Technology podcast. In this episode I explain what got me hooked on exploring how finances affect people’s lives, and why we don’t understand our own financial behaviours despite money affecting so much of what we do.

I also share some stories from my consulting life, including anecdotes that illustrate why understanding the cultural is so important as well as the value that anthropologists bring to fintech companies.

We discuss the latest edition of the Consumer Finance Research Toolkit, and how fintechs can create niche solutions which address specific financial needs untapped by banks.

Lastly, we talk about the Female Finance report that I co-wrote with Dr Anette Broløs, and why it makes commercial sense to deliver financial services specifically for women.

You can listen to the podcast here, or if you prefer you can read the transcript.

Gawain and I are happy to announce that we have released an updated version of the Consumer Finance Research Methods Toolkit. Originally released in 2016, we produced this Toolkit with the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion (IMTFI) to highlight innovative ways that researchers are using methods to understand financial behaviour.

The 2020 version of the Toolkit includes a brand new chapter on current issues in the finance industry, updated case studies, and references to plenty of recent (and fabulous) research. 

We hope you enjoy the Toolkit. Please do get in touch to let us know what you think, what's missing, and how we can collaborate to build a better financial world for humans! 

Have you ever thought how strange it is that financial solutions for women should be marketed in pink? Or what financial services firms are missing by not fully meeting female customers' needs?

Get the answer and find a first overview of the ecosystem of fintech for women in this study by EWPN in partnership with Keen Innovation. The report, “Female Finance: Digital, Mobile, Networked”, was produced by EWPN Research Leads Dr. Erin B. Taylor and Dr. Anette Broløs.

Around the world, an increasing number of financial service offerings are designed for (and by) women. We provide a first overview of such solutions. We point to some differences from traditional financial services and relate them to existing research.

We find factual reasons (income, expected lifetime, education and more) why women might look for different solutions than men.  We also find some other priorities. Women value narratives that help them conceptualize how financial services will help them manage. They look for solutions that target their life situation. Women value the possibility to handle their finances along with other people they trust – in a community. There is also a learning aspect dominant in many of the offerings that we studied, either in the form of blogs, interviews, events, e-courses or academies.

We hope that this overview helps both industry and researchers to better understand why women’s needs and life contexts must be taken into account when designing financial services. We also point out the need for further research.

Download the report here.

I'm happy to announce that the reports from the Maintainerati unconference in Berlin in May 2019 are now available to download. 

Maintainerati Berlin brought together nearly 80 maintainers from all over the world to share their experiences of running and maintaining digital infrastructure projects. The reports present a summary of the many, and varied, discussions that took place on 24 May 2019 in the Spreespeicher Center in Berlin.

The Event Report presents an analysis of 12 “Key Challenges and Lessons” that occurred repeatedly across the different sessions. For each one we describe what it is, what participants think causes it, and their ideas for how to solve it. In the conclusion, Creating Culture Change, we make some initial suggestions for what can be done to create healthier open source communities.

The Session Notes are a record of all 29 discussion sessions that took place on the day.We are making these session summaries freely available in the hope that maintainers, researchers and policy-makers can use them to better understand the problems faced by communities developing digital infrastructure. We have provided our own analysis in the Event Report, but we encourage the open source community to dig deeper on their own.

To learn more, visit the Maintainerati website or contact me at erin@canela-group.com.