The project examined day-to-day money management practices among women from low-income, socially embedded households and their amenability to digitisation. It starts from the premise that such households face persistent uncertainty due to irregular incomes, unexpected expenditure shocks, and illiquid assets. As women typically manage household finances, they respond to these uncertainties through intuitive, experience-based practices rather than explicit analysis. Their approach resolves into three distinct strategies: accessing liquidity through social and business networks (liquidity farming), adjusting the timing and amount of income (income shaping), and earmarking money across a hierarchy of goals (animating money). While historically embedded in social contexts, these practices are increasingly interacting with digital financial systems.
Against this backdrop, the project assessed whether existing digital financial services align with households’ financial realities. Participants were offered the option to digitise payments via UPI using an ambassador model, where women from the community were trained to support others in transitioning to digital payments. The study tracked all transactions both UPI and others, the reasoning behind them, and participants’ financial planning and goals. Data was collected fortnightly over 6 months from 299 participants.
Preliminary analysis indicates that the ambassador model has substantial scope for increasing the adoption of digital payments, even after the assistance period. The analysis also shows that several money management practices are primarily used to deepen social relationships, which help cope with contingencies. Further, we also find that digitisation enables new transaction patterns, such as payments to siblings, which were conspicuously absent in non-digital modes. By systematically documenting these practices, the study seeks to inform the design of financial products better aligned to the decision-making processes.
