Innovation

The Centre for Financial Health recognizes the importance of creating impact with last-mile customers while maintaining a “test and learn” culture and building evidence base and learning for cross-country collaboration on financial health. The “test and learn” culture creates a space for entrepreneurs, fintech companies, financial institutions, innovation hubs and the likes to test alternative business models and out-of-the-box ideas. These innovations would be more than just digital technologies as socio-economic factors that play a role in one’s financial health will necessitate behavioural science ingenuities to optimize outcome deliveries more efficiently.

To foster such culture, the Centre implements i) Collaboration Studio for Solutioning innovation targeting specific customer problems; ii) South-South Collaboration to share knowledge between markets of the Global South and create opportunities for collaboration and partnership; and iii) Living Labs to drive and track impact through solutions and business models in a specific market and also to create the environment to scale.

Our work in innovation aims to drive evidence-based understandings of different segments and iterate solutions to make the business case more relevant and evident. The collaborative engagements also call for the adoption of financial health measurements frameworks that span public and private sectors.

The Centre’s Collaboration Studio for Solutioning supports the development of new financial and business models, products, services, and experiences that are directed toward financial health. A clear problem statement is defined that is featured through challenges or call for applications to crowd-in solutions on targeted issues across different sectors – agriculture, education, health, and finance and segments of customers including women, youth, farmers, elderly, micro-enterprises, gig workers and so on. It then supports putting these models to work in the respective markets.

The Centre collaborates with players over a course of time in a systematic manner to develop and refine their solutions or business models. It facilitates infrastructure to support a collaborative space for financial institutions and fintech companies to exchange ideas in a community-led environment and co-design new financial products. Solution providers are supported through an incubation process over the course of a few months where they test their prototype. Those that demonstrate the ability to create uptake and commercial viability are selected for pilot initiation and deployment in a Living Lab market.

Find out about our current and past challenges

The Centre prioritizes peer to peer exchanges, both among least developed countries (LDCs) and between LDCs and developed nations. Acting as a bridge between markets of the Global South it intends to share knowledge and promote new collaboration opportunities in the space of innovations and emerging topics. Under the Collaboration Studio, it will host a virtual platform to bring together various stakeholders at the market level to solve problems and discover solutions while connecting the solutions to potential investors for scale.

Testing solutions in a live environment means tackling on-ground challenges, scaling up the pieces that work, going back to the drawing board when dots don’t connect, and most of all bonding with our community a bit more.

Through bringing together a diverse set of local, regional and global stakeholders to analyse and identify problems and best practices, the purpose of the Labs is to pilot, iterate and refine financial health solutions to learn what works and what doesn’t for a more resilient future. We work with gig-economy workers, the ageing population and women enterprises, populations that need more attention than ever in this digitally evolving age. The Labs also mobilise market players to solve financial health challenges, such as scarce savings and limited access to credit.

Explore our living labs