FINCA ends poverty through sustainable and scalable solutions driven by the insights and needs of people in the communities where they live and work.

FINCA Impact Finance (FIF) recognizes that many individuals, especially women who are the primary breadwinners, lack access to essential financial services needed to build livelihoods and resilience. These women often struggle to meet basic needs (e.g., food, shelter, education for children) and have recently faced life-altering crises (e.g., COVID, illness, death, divorce, or displacement) that have long-lasting impacts. With limited business or financial management skills, traditional financial solutions are often insufficient to provide them a path out of extreme poverty. This project sought to reimagine how FINCA could better serve this population.

Tangerine Lab applied Human-Centered Design (HCD) methodologies in Jordan and Uganda, representing diverse African and Eurasian contexts, to:

• Understand the needs and challenges of this population, their decision-making processes, and actions in achieving goals under difficult circumstances.

• Identify opportunities for providing innovative, multi-dimensional solutions tailored to their needs.

• Develop a customer experience strategy roadmap that directly addresses their motivations and challenges.

Additionally, FINCA sought to build internal capacity to sustain similar initiatives after Tangerine Lab’s engagement concluded.

Tangerine Lab's engagement included:

• Remote and in-person HCD workshops for FIF functional experts and leaders, covering design research techniques such as empathy research, persona development, customer journey mapping, empathy mapping, and basic analysis. These were followed by two weeks of immersive learning through hands-on experience.

• Leading and supervising the formative research efforts with the trained team. The research offered human-centered insights into commonalities across regions, while also highlighted geography-specific differences relevant to FIF's broader footprint.

• Identifying six key customer personas to guide FINCA’s customer experience strategy for the target population.

• Delivering a comprehensive understanding of the target personas' challenges, needs, goals, influences, and life circumstances, along with tailored value propositions to guide FINCA's customer experience strategy from ideation to implementation.

• Providing three strategic pillars for customer experience innovation and a long-term roadmap aligned with FINCA's new mission. This roadmap currently serves as a blueprint for expanding services to underserved populations throughout the global footprint of FINCA Impact Finance.