Digital financial service players: Karandaaz Pak running digital experiments programme

ISLAMABAD: Karandaaz Pakistan with the support of Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) and UK's Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) is running a digital experiments programme to support the digital financial service (DFS) players.

This programme facilitates the private sector institutions to undertake experiments using the A/B testing research technique to address the barriers related to uptake and active usage of digital accounts. This is an ongoing programme and interested DFS providers such as mobile money operators, fintech, and startups working in the realm of DFS can apply at any time through Karandaaz website https://bit.ly/3e4BKIQ.

A special focus of these experiments is on testing ideas, products, services, and incentive structures that can accelerate the uptake by excluded and underserved segments, especially rural women.

The key areas of interest for the experiments are the conversion of inactive/non-users to active users through variation in communication strategies; increase in user's engagement on digital accounts by product level changes; testing of price elasticity on payment transactions by end-users; and promotion of mobile account usage by conducting financial inclusion focused experiments, especially targeting women.

Under this programme, Karandaaz supported an experiment with Hysab Kytab, a fintech that provides digital financial management solutions for individuals and banks. As part of the experiment, Hysab Kytab developed a tailored version of the application for women through an intricate design and communication strategy.

Ali Sarfraz, CEO Karandaaz said, "we support our partners with technical and financial resources in making sure that those solutions have an intuitive design for a friendly customer experience and long-term adaptability."

Rehan Akhtar, Chief Digital Officer of Karandaaz said, "The overarching goal of this programme is to collect the learnings within Pakistan's context through these experiments and share the insights with other technology brands, enabling them to build DFS for specifically for women."

Yasir Ilyas, Global Head at Hysab Kytab said, "We have discovered that after the inclusion of gender integrated design in our app, there was a sharp decline in user acquisition cost by over 40 percent."

Copyright Business Recorder, 2020