Understanding Interface Design and Mobile Money

Perceptions in Latin America

Chun-Wei Chiang1 , Caroline Anderson1,5 , Claudia Flores-Saviaga1 ,
Eduardo Jr Arenas4 , Felipe Colin2 , Mario Romero4 , Cuauhtemoc Rivera-Loaiza3 ,
Norma Elva Chavez2 , Saiph Savage1
1 West Virginia University, <cc0051,saiph.savage>@mail.wvu.edu
2 Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM), [email protected]
3 Universidad Michoacana de San, Morelia, Michoacan, Mexico,
4 Bitso, [email protected]
arXiv:1803.05032v1 [cs.HC] 13 Mar 2018

5 University High School

ABSTRACT in Latin America where a significant number of citizens have

Mobile money can facilitate financial inclusion in develop- migrated to more affluent or politically stable countries, but
ing countries, which usually have high mobile phone use and still retain strong ties to their friends and families back home.
steady remittance activity. Many countries in Latin America Remittances from the United States to Mexico are the fourth
meet the minimum technological requirements to use mobile largest in the world, accounting for 25.2 billion US Dollars
money, however, the adoption in this region is relatively low. in 2015 [27]. As a percentage of Mexico’s GDP, remittances
This paper investigates the different factors that lead people account for a 2.3% [21]. It seems logical that people in Latin
in Latin America to distrust and therefore not adopt mobile America would adopt mobile money to do their transactions.
money. For this purpose, we analyzed 27 mobile money ap- However, despite its potential, the number of mobile money
plications on the market and investigated the perceptions that users in Latin America is very low. For instance, less than
people in Latin America have of such interfaces. From our 10% of all Mexicans have a mobile money account registered
study, we singled out the interface features that have the great- [6]. We currently lack an understanding about why mobile
est influence in user adoption in developing countries. We money is still not adopted at scale in Latin America.
identified that for the Latin America market it is crucial to
In this paper, we are specifically interested in understanding
create mobile applications that allow the user to visualize and
the interface factors that can facilitate the acceptance of mobile
understand the workflow through which their money is trav-
money in Latin America. For this purpose, we first presented
eling to recipients. We examined the significance of these
a design space that defines how mobile money applications
findings in the design of future mobile money applications
can be organized and categorized. We created different mobile
that can effectively improve the use of electronic financial
money prototypes within this design space, and interviewed
transactions in Latin America.
and surveyed people from Latin America to start to understand
how people from these developing regions perceive and trust
ACM Classification Keywords
each type of design.
H.5.2 User Interfaces
Through our study, we reveal that for people in Latin America
Author Keywords it is especially important to visualize the workflow through
Mobile money; user adoption; mobile interface which their money is traveling. Latin Americans have trust
issues with mobile money applications. Therefore, clear visu-
INTRODUCTION alizations and an understanding of how the mobile application
Mobile money is a service (e.g., PayPal [14], M-Pesa [10], functions are extremely important. Mobile money applica-
Venmo) that allows users to access and transfer funds via tions that are based on chat and that work as a black box to the
mobile devices. It has been gaining importance in recent years end-user do not seem to be effective and useful for Latin Amer-
in light of the global ubiquity of smartphones and the constant icans. Together, our study helps to establish the basis for the
growth of remittances [18], especially where immigrants want design of mobile money applications for the Latin American
an easy way to send money to their friends and family in their market.
home towns. The use of remittance is especially important
RELATED WORK
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or
classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed
for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation Mobile Money and Developing Countries
on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM Mobile money provides financial services, including peer-to-
must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish,
to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a
peer (p2p) transfers, bill payment, insurance products and
fee. Request permissions from [email protected]. banking through mobile devices [3]. Mobile money systems
CLIHC’17, November 8-10, 2017, Antigua Guatemala, Guatemala provide lower transaction fees than alternative services, as
©2017 Association for Computing Machinery.
ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-5429-5/17/11 $15.00 well as better privacy and [19] shorter transaction time. They
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3151470.3151473
also give users financial autonomy and can solve the financial Identifying Interface Features of Mobile Money Apps
inclusion problem in rural areas [3]. We inspected 27 mobile money applications - Abra, An-
droid Pay, Apple Pay, Azimo, Bank of America, Bitpesa,
As a result, mobile money has seen successful cases in de-
Bitsparks, Mobi, CirclePay, Coinapult, Coinbase, coins.ph,
veloping countries, such as the M-pesa in Kenya [10] and
Facebook Messenger payment, MoneyGram, Paypal, Trans-
SMART Communications and Globe Telecom in the Philip-
ferwise, Venmo, Western Union, Xoom, Zelle, Popmoney,
pines [28]. However, mobile money has not advanced in all
Snapcash, Squarecash, Payfriendz, Nooch, Payza, and Gmail
developing countries. Latin America has very low mobile
payment (on Google play or iTunes Store). We studied the
money usage. The survey results [6] of the International Mon-
different features of each of these mobile money applications
etary Fund assert that only 8% of Mexicans have a mobile
and categorized them manually into three (3) main clusters
money account registered. While financial institutions want
which define our design space. In the following, we present
to promote mobile money in Latin America, it has not been
and discuss the main features we found differentiated each
simple to replicate the success that has been observed in other
mobile money application.
developing countries [28, 12]. Previous research has identified
that the protective bank supervision and the infrastructure in
Latin America is likely what is limiting the development of Feature I: Connection to Users’ Social Networks
mobile money [5, 4, 8, 30]. Nevertheless, we lack an under- One of the main features that differentiated mobile money
standing of how interface design might affect and facilitate applications was whether they connected to social media con-
the adoption of mobile money in Latin America [30], which tent or social content stored on mobile devices (e.g., friend
might be one of the main reasons why this region of the world lists). Connecting to social media includes being able to sign
is currently heavily excluded from digital money transactions. up with particular social media platforms, such as Facebook
or Twitter, and interact with the friend lists from these social
media services. Mobile money applications with connections
to social media usually have users create their accounts using
User Adoption to Mobile Money
data from different social media services. The social media
There is a large body of research that has investigated how service provides basic information to the mobile money ap-
people adopt e-banking. Much of this paper concludes that plication such as the user’s name, phone number, and email
security, user-friendliness, convenience, [15, 24, 11] and trust address, reducing the time that the user has to invest in sign-
[31, 29] affect user adoption of e-banking. However, the ing up. In this case, the mobile money application can also
customers of mobile money are considerably different from access its users’ phone contacts and friends lists on different
the customers of E-banking services. E-banking services are social media platforms. This interface feature allows users to
viewed as an add-on that banks provide as an alternative chan- send money directly to their friends; users no longer have to
nel for existing bank customers, while mobile money normally write down complex details about their contacts before send-
focuses on people who are not bank customers per se. Mobile ing them money. This type of feature also lets people visualize
money gives financial inclusion for the lower segment who how their friends and family make use of the mobile money
cannot afford banks or have been excluded by banks because application. In our examination, we studied how viewing the
of their bad credit score or other reasons. mobile money transactions of friends from different social
There has also been research covering how social networks media platforms and being able to interact with them on the
affect user adoption of mobile money [16, 20, 22, 34]. This system directly correlates with the trust a person has for the
research reveals that social networks can greatly enhance the mobile money application.
user experience in mobile money tools. For example, if a
person’s friends also use mobile money, the person is likely Feature II: Instant messaging service
to also adopt such services. However, such studies have not Instant messaging service is a real-time exchange of text, im-
researched how integrating an online social network into the ages, video, and voice over an online chat service [36]. In
design of the mobile money application actively changes the the case of mobile money applications, the integration of an
adoption of the system. This paper helps provide a more instant messaging service enables people to chat in real-time
detailed understanding about how integrating social networks with other users of the application, especially their contacts.
into a mobile money application affects the adoption of such Such feature might help people in maintaining and developing
technology. relationships within the mobile money application [25].

Feature III: In-app sharing

DEFINING THE MOBILE MONEY DESIGN SPACE In-app sharing is about enabling people to share their experi-
We focused first on defining the design space for mobile ence with the mobile money application with other users of the
money, and then investigated how people in Latin America system. Usually, the sharing can be published to all the other
perceive the different mobile money designs within this design users in the application or just specific users. Underwood,
space. We examined how different interface factors influence Robert, et al. [32] commented that sharing experiences among
people’s acceptance of mobile money applications. For this customers can help build brand identity and elicit strong, effec-
purpose, we allow people to use different mobile money appli- tive ties to the firm. In this case, we studied how this feature
cations, and we then interview and survey their perceptions of can help people in Latin America to develop more trust for
such applications. mobile money applications.
 I (Social Networking) II (Messaging) III (In-app Sharing) IV (Friend-Invitation)
Cluster A: Individual Interface
Cluster B: Friends-based Interface
Cluster C: Chat-based interface
Table 1. Overview of each cluster and the features they present. Columns represent the features (I: connection to Users’ Social Networks, II: Instant
Messaging Service, III: In-app Sharing, IV: Friend-Inviting Program). Row is the cluster. means the cluster has that particular feature.

Feature IV: Friend-inviting program Cluster C: Chat-based interfaces

To attract new customers, some mobile money applications The main characteristic of chat-based interfaces (Figure 1c) is
have a referral system. Friend inviting or referral is a program that they give the user the ability to send instant messages to
that allows people to get digital rewards as they interact with others users on the platform. There are two types of chat-based
other individuals on the platform; this can include inviting new interface applications. The first one bootstramps on exisiting
people onto the application. For instance, PayPal users can social media platforms to allow people to easily send messages
get $5 when they invite a friend who has never used PayPal to their social media contacts, such is the case of Snapcash in
before. Snapchat. The other type of applications also connect to social
media, but they create their own virtual communities. For
Design Space of Mobile Money Apps (Clusters) example, Venmo allows its users to communicate with each
Based on these different features, we clustered mobile money other and even share their mobile money transacction as public
applications into three primary interface models: individual messages. Wechat payment [9], has had a great success in
interfaces, contacts-based interfaces, and social-networked China. However, we lack an understanding of how these chat-
interfaces. Table 1 provides an overview of each cluster with based interfaces interplay in developing countries. Previous
the interface features associated with each one. work has shown that sharing messages about one’s experiences
using the mobile money application may inspire other users to
Cluster A: Individual interfaces
utilize the application more [26]. The chat-based interface also
Individual interface applications are the basic type of mobile provides other benefits. After senders remit the money to the
money applications (Figure 1a). They do not connect to the recipients, they can check the transaction correctness on the
social network of the user, however, they provide the most sim- application without another channel. For instance, a farmer
ple user interface and present the workflow clearly (i.e., they in the United State can remit $200 to his family in Mexico.
showcase how money is being transferred from one point to He can directly ask his family to send him an instant message
the next). The user, in this case, needs to provide the basic in- once they receive the money. The family therefore does not
formation of the recipient, including name, bank account, and need to call him back or use a Short-Message-Service, which
phone number (depending on whether they want the person might be missed, to inform him.
to be notified of the money transaction). Individual interface
models show less concern about the relationship between the
sender and the recipient. Notice, however, that this does not
EVALUATION
mean that the mobile money application does not care about
We investigated the perceptions that people from Latin Amer-
their users; they build their brand identity and customer loyalty
ica had about each of these different interfaces via interviews
in other ways.
and a survey.
Cluster B: Friends-based Interfaces
Friends-based (Figure 1b) interface employs the friend’s list on
a social-network service, such as Facebook or Google, or the Participants
phone contacts on sender’s mobile phone to get the necessary We recruited a stratified sample based on their habit of us-
information of the recipient, but does not include any instant ing online banking (14% of Mexicans use traditional banking
messaging function. When users sign up, they can choose to service and 78% of Mexican use online banking or both tradi-
sign up directly or with a social media service. The interface tional and online banking service [2]) from a street-intercept
can store the user’s friends and contacts list. If the user sends survey done during large scale events in Latin America. These
money to his or her friends, but the friends have not signed events gathered people from all over Latin America (Mexico,
up for the application, the application will send the money to Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, among other countries). The
a pseudo-account and ask their friends to sign up to get the total sample size is 88 mobile phone users, with 16 of them
money. There are several advantages to this type of interface. not having experience on operating remittance service on the
First, it can reduce human error, such as typing errors or internet and 62 of them having experience on online banking
spelling mistakes, as the mobile money application gets the system. Their age ranged between 18 and 40 years (M = 24.13,
basic information directly from the contacts or friend list. SD = 4.80, Median = 22.92); 29.5% of the participants were
Second, it invites people who have never used the application. female and 70.5% were male. 38.6% of participants have more
Baker, et al. [1] observed that user would be more active and than 6 years of experience in using mobile phones, 46.6% of
stay longer in a network when they are invited by people with participants had between 4-6 years of experience in using mo-
the same social identity. We assumed applications that adopt bile phones, and 14.8% of participants reported to have less
friends-based interface may produce more high-loyalty users. than three experience using mobile phones.
Figure 1. Overview of the different interface probes we presented to participants. Each of the interfaces represents designs from one of the clusters we
identified previously. Figure a) the Individual Interface Model; b) the Friend-based Interface Model; c) the Chat-based Interface Model.

Our participants had varying degrees of experience with using In the second part of the survey we had participants use 3
mobile money and international remittance services. We ques- different mobile money applications (one from each of the
tioned them about international remittance services, as this is clusters). After participants used the interfaces we asked them
one of the main uses that people in Latin America have for mo- to compare the three interfaces and evaluate which model
bile money. Our participants presented 3 types of experiences gave them more confidence and which interface they felt they
with mobile money: (1) those that never used mobile finan- would use the most. We counterbalanced the order in which
cial services or international remittances (Newcomers of the we showcased each interface to participants. After participants
Payment Market), (2) those that never used mobile financial finished the survey, we interviewed them. The interview ques-
services but used international remittance services (Interna- tions dug deeper into how people perceived and trusted each
tional Remittance Savvy), and (3) those with experience using mobile money application. Notice that for all interfaces we
mobile financial services (Mobile Financial Services Experts). asked participants about specific interface factors that previous
13 of our subjects were in the first category, 41 were in the work had identified were important for user adoption of the
second, and 33 were in the third. money application [35, 13, 17]. We were interested in studying
how such factors played out in people’s perceptions in Latin
Survey and Interviews America. All the opinions that measure the user adoption were
Our survey had two main parts: (1) questioning people about reported on a five-point Likert scale, where 5 is very important
their experiences with different mobile money applications and 1 is not important. We view Likert scale data as ordinal
and their perceptions of different features of mobile money data because the value assigned to a Likert item has no objec-
applications, and (2) having people directly use different types tive numerical basis. Therefore, we collected the responses
of mobile money applications based on our clusters and ques- into the bar chart and analyze the data with the mode and the
tioning people about their perceptions of such interfaces. We frequency participants chose.
interviewed people about their perceptions and impressions of
each interface. RESULTS
In this section, we present what our survey disclosed about
The first part of our survey was about collecting information the Latin Americans’ experiences with mobile money and the
about participants’ background knowledge of mobile money.
interface features that affected their adoption of mobile money
The survey asked a series of questions related to their expe-
applications. In the subsequent section, we discuss what we
rience, such as how frequently they send money or received
learned about Latin American’s mobile money habits and their
money from abroad, and the frequency with which they uti-
confidence in remittance channels.
lized mobile applications to transfer money to other individu-
als. The survey also questioned participants about their habits Overall, 43 % of the mobile phone users in our sample trans-
of transferring money and how much they trusted each money ferred money through online financial service, while 39% of
transfer channel. Lastly, we asked participants several se- our participants transferred money through brick and mortar
quential questions about their thoughts on different interface financial service despite having the experience of operating
features. online financial service. 29.7% of the people who have access
Figure 2. Overview of the factors that participants consider important Figure 4. Overview of the ratio of people in each group who consider that
and most important when deciding whether they trust a mobile money particular factors are important for trusting mobile money applications.
application in Latin America. Good service and clear workflows were Besides the clear workflow and good service, brand reputation plays an
the factors that influenced people’s trust in mobile money applications important role in trusting mobile money applications. This is especially
the most. true for people who are “International Remittance Savvy”.

shows that security (90%) and transaction speed (82%) are es-
sential features when users choose remittance channels. Over
60% users in the sample trust and want to use the individ-
ual interface model more than the other two models which
involve social connections. It seems for Latin Americans it
is most important to have a clear work flow that allows them
to understand how money is moving in the system. This is
more important than having social connections available. Our
finding also showcased that security and transaction speed are
the most important factors to choose remittance channel.
Figure 3. Overview of the factors that participants consider most impor- Our study also showcases how people’s experiences with mo-
tant when choosing a remittance channel (service through which they bile financial services and international remittances interplay
will send their money). Most of our participants indicated that security with people’s acceptance and usage to mobile money, see
and transaction speed are the key issues in the selection of their remit-
tance channel. Figures 4 and 5. Based on their experiences, we classified
and clustered participants of our study into 3 types. In the
following we present the differences between each type of
user.
to their bank’s online financial services instead use services
provided by other financial institutions or bitcoin.
Newcomers of the Payment Market (14.8%)
Mobile phone users in our sample have confidence in bank
The users who belong to this group never used mobile financial
employees (mode = 5, median = 4); however, our participants
reported less confidence (mode = 3, median = 3) in other finan- services or international remittance and rarely had any expe-
cial services employees, such as Western Union and PayPal. riences with transferring money to others. Compared to the
Yet, we saw that in general people in Latin America did not other types of users, these individuals do not have the high con-
trust technology to interact with their finances. In our survey, fidence in banks and financial institutions (mode = 4, median
the participants have less confidence in online financial service, = 4, but mode = 5 in other two groups). For these individuals
both bank (mode = 4, median = 4) and other financial institu- what was most important within the interface was security.
tions (mode = 3, median = 3, and 42% participants distrust it) Therefore it seems that to involve these individuals into mo-
bile money applications, so companies may need to showcase
than in human employees. The preferred mode of interaction
that users can indeed trust and have security over their digital
to access their finances was with humans who could ensure
financial transactions. It might also help to have mobile money
them that everything was in order and rapidly respond to all
applications that are not linked to well-established banking
their questions. For people in Latin America it was extremely
important to have a sense of control and be able to understand institutes but rather more independent or distributed banking
how their finances were moving. groups (given their distrust for institutions). It was also in-
teresting to observe that these individuals are the ones who
Our study (see Figure 2) also revealed that good service (82%) are most accepting of social networking features, as well as
and clear work flow (80%) are the most important factors that chat-based features. These individuals seemed opened to new
could enhance people’s adoption of mobile money. Figure 3 technological innovation.
 However, how much a person values clear workflows and
transparency seems to depend on the individual’s background
and experience. In particular, those who do not have expe-
rience with mobile financial services and traditional money
transfer channels had a higher acceptance to novel interfaces,
such as chat-based interface model, than other groups. The
reason might be that they are not limited by the process of the
current system and they have more imagination about what
mobile money can be.
Our results also suggest that mobile money providers need to
embrace new strategies for people with international remit-
tance experience. Given that these individuals are accustomed
to the current financial system, the process of using mobile
Figure 5. Overview of the ratio of people in each group who consider money should not be significantly different than transferring
that particular factors are important for deciding what remittance chan- money through talking to banking staff. It might therefore
nel to use. Security in general was a crucial factor when selecting the re- be important to consider crowd-powered interfaces that could
mittance channel, especially for newcomers. “Mobile Financial Services allow people to send money and receive real-time human as-
Experts” consider that efficient transactions are equally as important as
security. sistance as the money is transferred, similar to when someone
visits and completes the transactions within a bank.
We also observed that brand reputation was important for
International Remittance Savvy (46.6 %) people with experience in international remittance. Therefore,
This group had plenty of experience with money transfers but creating brand reputation before promoting the mobile money
very little with mobile money applications. These individuals service might also be a good strategy to enhance user adoption.
have the highest confidence in the bank and financial insti- To engage the people who have experience in mobile finan-
tutions than any other group. Our survey shows that people cial service, mobile money providers might want to consider
experienced with international remittance paid more attention integrating more transparent technology, as these individuals
not only to good service and clear workflow but also on brand trust the technology but not the financial system behind the
reputation when they first used the financial service. The technology.
integration of social network data seemed to have the least
acceptance in this group. This feature simply did not seem to Our finding also showcased that security and transaction speed
be important for these users. are the most important decisive factors when Latin Americans
chose a remittance channel. Mobile money helps reduce the
Mobile Financial Services Experts (38.6%) transaction time [3], hence this technology has the potential to
People in this group had the longest (4-6 years) experience be easily adopted in Latin America. However, the security of
using mobile phones, and this likely lead them to adopt mobile mobile money depends on the service provider. The problem
financial services. This group also does not trust banking of security includes malware attacks, identity theft, phishing
systems, but they do have a high acceptance of its related schemes, account fraud [18] and inside jobs. Given that current
technology, which facilitates their adoption of mobile money technology already offers sufficient solutions to the first four
applications. This group also seems to appreciate having clear attack methods, establishing transparency is the fundamental
workflows, especially as they distrust the financial banking issue for alleviating security concerns because inside jobs and
institutes. other risks can be avoided or mollified when the customers
can easily check each transactions they have had.
DISCUSSION
Mobile money provides an opportunity to improve financial One of the most important relevations of our paper is that
inclusion in Latin America; nonetheless, user adoption of for the Latin America mobile money market it is crucial to
mobile money has been particularly slow in this region. Our showcase how the workflow functions. In Latin America
paper suggests what features are discouraging user adoption of straight-forward workflows are valued greatly by all types
mobile money in Latin America and provides a model which of users. This feature is valued much more than any social
helps the promotion of mobile money within this region. interface. This result is surprising when we consider that in
other developing countries, e.g., in the Asian market, the chat-
In sum, our results suggest that people in Latin America have based interface model helped mobile money become extremely
trust issues with financial institutions, particularly in countries popular. However, it seems that such interface model cannot
like Mexico that have had bank collapses in recent times [7]. be duplicated in Latin America because the culture and the
This distrust also seems to be present in how they adopt and background are different than in Asia. People in Latin America
use mobile money services. Having clear and transparent appear to have more distrust for their financial institutions and
workflows of how their money is transferred therefore becomes as a result they value more transparent and clear mobile money
crucial for people in Latin America, as this enables them to interfaces than social interfaces. We believe that bringing more
be able to be vigilant if they want to and understand how their
money is flowing.
transparency into the interface model can promote the mobile insightful comments for the paper study, and to our partici-
money inclusion in Latin America and increase user adoption. pants.

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