Six actionable principles shaping the next era of inclusive product design.

by Seth Spiro, FINCA Vice President, Chief Product Officer

The pursuit of better credit products for the financially marginalized often overlooks a fundamental first step: defining better. For millions of people living on the margins, traditional microfinance models and microcredit products— although well-intentioned — don’t provide the flexibility low-income customers truly need.

Picture a woman in Uganda running a small market stall selling cassava. Her earnings cover school fees and medical expenses, but when she seeks credit to expand her crop yield and modernize her tools, the options are limited. The microfinance institutions near her offer rigid three-month repayment schedules and loan amounts that fall short of what she requires. The terms do not take into account the realities of her seasonal income and the complexities of her financial life.

For FINCA and other inclusive finance providers, this is the challenge — and the opportunity. Designing productive credit that can scale and adapt to the unique businesses, needs, and goals of the customers we serve demands a new definition of better.

That’s why at FINCA, we’re reimagining credit solutions that are deeply informed by the lived experiences of populations in places where formal finance rarely reaches. These are remote communities, far from bank branches and stable internet connections, that are often excluded from the data that drives most product decisions. By grounding our work in human-centered design, behavioral insight, and agile development, and working with cross-functional teams across our operations, we’re building a new generation of products that are more relevant and tailored to people’s lives.

At this year’s 2025 Financial Inclusion Week, hosted by the Center for Financial Inclusion, I joined several product leaders in the inclusive finance space to ask a deceptively simple question: What does it take to design credit products that deliver scale, speed, and impact, especially in a world defined by volatility?

What emerged from our session with Khalid Kabeer, Chief Product Officer at AdalFi, Diana Cazacu, Managing Partner at AdVision Finance, and Christine Wanjiru, Lead of Digital Transformation at BRAC International, was a clear message: Designing productive credit isn’t about digitizing legacy systems. It’s about rethinking our entire approach to product development.

It’s a tall order, but after talking with these experts, I’m more convinced than ever that it’s possible. The following six takeaways from our session offer a great starting point for what comes next.

1. Design for a New Generation of Customers

To design products that truly work for people, we need to recognize how dramatically customer expectations have shifted. Today’s clients, especially younger ones, expect speed, hyper-convenience, and streamlined digital experiences tailored to their preferences and behaviors. “The way customer behavior is changing is how service providers have to change,” Khalid said. “Otherwise, they will become obsolete very quickly.”

The rise of embedded finance and Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) is an example of credit being delivered in new ways, often directly at the point of commerce. These models reflect how the next generation thinks about financial services not as standalone products, but as seamless predictive tools that respond to their needs in the moment.

2. Design with Governance and Talent in Mind

Innovation doesn’t happen in a vacuum. For institutions to build products that meet the demands of the current market, leadership must be aligned with agile, data-driven approaches. Khalid pointed out that “boards often ask for perfect business cases before testing, which slows everything down.”

He stressed the importance of bringing in new kinds of talent — mathematicians, engineers, data scientists — who can build for the future. “We must have the new generation capacity in our organizations to build products for the next generation,” he concluded.

3. Design from Behavioral Data, Not Assumptions

In financial inclusion, expanding access and maintaining performance are often treated as competing goals. But the most effective products make these goals mutually reinforcing by reflecting how people actually live and transact. Diana noted, “When you design from behavioral data, not assumptions, inclusion and institutional strengths move together.”

She illustrated this with an example of a transaction-based loan developed using mobile money data for an SME bank in Africa. Analyzing behavioral signals like sales frequency, income fluctuations, and account use — rather than relying on the traditional collateral or paperwork — enabled the product to offer instant, short-term loans to businesses that don’t usually have access to immediate loans. At the same time, the use of real-time data improved risk assessment and operational efficiency, demonstrating how inclusive design can drive performance improvements.

4. Design for Variety and Volatility

We also need to rethink inclusion as a strategy for segmentation and growth. Financial lives are varied and unpredictable, and products must reflect that complexity. “Inclusion isn’t one-size-fits-all,” Diana noted, pointing to women in rural markets who juggle trading, farming, and caregiving. These overlapping roles create irregular income patterns that financial products often overlook. Adapting to these realities enables institutions to reach underserved populations more effectively and build more resilient portfolios.

In one project, AdVision Finance introduced grace periods and dynamic repayment terms as a deliberate strategy to manage unpredictability for rural women. The result was a significant improvement in default rates and client retention, proving that designing for variety and volatility can turn risk into insight and strengthen relationships with customers.

5. Design with Embedded Feeback and Purposeful Digitization

Product and process design should evolve together, with feedback as the bridge between them. Christine emphasized that at BRAC, digitization is never done for its own sake — it’s driven by field-level realities and client needs. “We embed change management and get feedback from staff across all levels, from top management to frontline credit officers,” she explained.

Take BRAC’s digital field application, which supports credit officers through every step of the lending process. By building feedback loops into the system, the team identified outdated steps that were slowing things down. These insights allowed BRAC to cut onboarding time from several days to one, resulting in a more adaptive system where workflow improvements directly enhance the delivery of credit, benefiting staff and customers alike.

6. Design for Simplicity and Resilience

Resilience shouldn’t just show up in the solutions we develop, but in the everyday decisions we make when designing for customers. “Our clients are very resilient,” Christine said. “It’s on us to emulate that resilience in our products and processes.”

Sometimes, that means making small but strategic tweaks: An SMS campaign informing clients about BRAC’s customer care line caused usage to jump from 6% to 20% in just one year. That simple change dramatically improved access to support and boosted customer engagement. Resilience doesn’t always require an overhaul — it can also be built through attentive design choices that prioritize listening, refining, and responding.

What these six takeaways have in common is a shift in mindset from designing for idealized users and circumstances to designing for real ones, with all their unpredictability and nuance. Building credit products that reflect how people actually live and earn means building better for the conditions that define today’s reality: volatility, speed, and constant change.

Watch the full session from Financial Inclusion Week.

Partner With the FINCA Poverty Eradication Lab

The FINCA Poverty Eradication Lab takes these principles from theory to practice, designing, testing, and scaling financial solutions that work for real people in real-world conditions. By combining human-centered design, data-driven insight, and partnerships across the FINCA network and beyond, it is building products that can thrive in the volatility and complexity that define today’s markets. The Lab is always looking for partners, supporters, and experts who share its belief that inclusive finance must evolve to meet the needs of those it serves. If you’re interested in partnering to find new solutions to problems that need to be solved, visit FINCA.org/poverty-eradication-lab.

This article first appeared on finca.org.