Maiden Labs

CBDC Field Research Insights for the 2023 Report, “CBDC: Expanding Financial Inclusion or Deepening the Divide? Exploring Design Choices that Could Make a Difference”

When we think about financial inclusion, we often imagine people going by themselves to financial institutions or directly using payment apps on their phones. We think of access as individual, direct, and unmediated.

For people in the village of El Progreso*, in the northern Sierra of Puebla (Mexico), access to financial services is never that simple. Despite cash predominating in this relatively remote rural area, most people also use financial services, whether for saving money, receiving remittances, or accessing credit. However, this access is rarely direct. All sorts of human intermediaries intervene in the process: friends, relatives, people with good credit, or personnel at financial institutions.

By analyzing the role played by those actors, I highlight some problems faced by people when they try to access financial services, as well as how they try to resolve these problems. I do not pretend to be exhaustive but rather demonstrate how important it is to look at those spaces of intermediation to understand better people’s monetary practices. This will allow me to challenge some common assumptions about access to financial services in rural areas.