A group of agricultural businesses from La Libertad approached Interbank about the particular needs and pains they had in the payment process for their essential workers. We got together as a team to assess the situation and come up with a solution.
Every month, farmers, who often go between jobs, go through a world of difficulties to get their debit cards in order to get their paychecks. Issues ranging from saturation of the only Interbank store in the zone, hyper long queues, massive transportation of personnel to the nearest alternative stores subsidised by their employers, to the inherent gap in accessibility and communication that conventional digital platforms present to the particular demographic we were attending to.
We went there in a 2 day research sprint, where we first gather all the information we could about them and the situation of the problem.
At the second day of research, after taking in and analyzing the insights, we came back with an idea. What if there isn't a debit card in the first place? Interbank had an already refined, fast and relatively simple cardless money withdrawal service available at their ATMs, so we just had to make an interface in order to make a self-service solution to help workers confirm their account and generate their withdrawal key.
When we went back with our prototype we came to find the workers were a resilient and supportive group of people willing to learn and adopt new methods and technology to aid their needs and that was AWESOME.
Basically all of them had access to at least a basic mobile device and service, making their use a potential channel to facilitate their transactions. Added to this, Interbank has an already refined, fast and relatively simple cardless money withdrawal service available at their ATMs. Putting these facts together brought us to a fast, iterative path towards the solution. Focusing our energies into the vastly more accesible mobile telephone service, we based our drafts and testing on USSD protocols and the cardless withdrawal service, continually streamlining the steps and flow of the service to guarantee the quality of life improvements the workers were desperately needing.
