How do you measure consumer sentiment toward a product or service people have never used before? This is one of the most pressing challenges when doing research into technology driven concepts such as fintech solutions, especially in Africa’s youthful, diverse and dynamic markets.
With over ten years pan-African research experience, we’ve specialized in turning these challenges into opportunities by designing research approaches that unlock authentic consumer insights and guide innovation across the continent.
The Challenge: Assessing Africa’s appetite for Open finance
When tasked with introducing African consumers to the emerging world of open finance, our team faced a dual challenge:
- Testing abstract concepts—pre-use-case ideas that consumers had little or no direct exposure to.
- Capturing authentic sentiment—ensuring that responses were not clouded by what is known as the “bike shed effect”, where participants focus on trivial aspects instead of engaging with more complex but critical issues.
The goal was clear: To capture how consumers might perceive, adopt, and trust new financial innovations while reflecting Africa’s diversity through a multi-country, research approach designed to be inclusive and participatory in its execution.
Our Approach: Making the Abstract Tangible
We recognized that introducing unfamiliar concepts required a bridge to consumers’ everyday realities. To achieve this, we embedded inclusive research methods and leveraged a product familiar across African contexts: mobile money payments. From MPESA in Kenya to MTN Mobile money in Rwanda and Zambia, we found that by anchoring new ideas and drawing near parallels to these widely used every-day platforms, we created a relatable entry point that enabled consumers to confidently engage with complex financial concepts and share authentic perspectives.
By grounding discussions in the lived experience of mobile money wallets, we gave respondents a relatable framework to explore new ideas. Some of the benefits yielded by this approach include:
- Providing consumers with confidence and clarity to engage in conversations that gave us richly nuanced data to work with.
- Allowing participants to draw relevant parallels between their daily use of mobile money and the potential of sharing financial data under open banking regimes.
- Shifting respondent engagement from hesitation to genuine curiosity and insight generation.
The Results: Rich Insights for Strategy
Our research revealed critical insights into:
- Perceptions of trust—how consumer experiences with mobile money had shaped willingness to share personal financial data with third parties.
- Risks vs. rewards—consumer attitudes toward the potential benefits of open banking versus perceived risks of data exposure.
- Adoption drivers—Considerations likely to influence how consumers and ecosystem actors potentially engage with open finance innovations.
The ability to root conversations in relatable, lived experiences ensured that findings were not abstract, but deeply meaningful, market relevant, authentic and actionable.
Why It Matters: Securing Africa’s Digital financial future through Trusted Insights
By bridging the gap between the familiar and the emerging, this case study illustrates how consumer realities can illuminate pathways for policy, regulation, and market ready design. Ultimately, the main take-away we strongly advocate for is this: That Africa’s future digital economic prospects will not be secured by technology alone, but by the deliberate use of culturally grounded, contextually inclusive research methods. Evidence that is generated through such approaches is not just descriptive, it is transformative, shaping strategies that are both sustainable and scalable across the continent.
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