IDEO.org starts a new project with the World Bank’s Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP) to identify opportunities for new and more accessible savings products serving low-income Mexicans. As we get ready to depart for Mexico, here's a quick overview of the project.

Our project will target working Mexicans earning between $400 and $800 a month. These potential customers that we’ll be learning about are at the base of the pyramid and don’t make enough money to be viable savings account customers in the current system. We’ll be using human-centered design to create product concepts that leverage modern technologies like the cell phone to reach these customers.

After completing a week of background research here in San Francisco, we’ll spend two and a half weeks in Mexico speaking with people from different social backgrounds in various financial situations. Once we return to the Bay Area, we’ll spend several weeks synthesizing what we learned in the field and then building several prototypes designed to engage potential customers.

Toward the end of the project, we’ll return to Mexico and test these prototypes with potential customers in the field. This “fail fast” prototyping model will allow our IDEO.org team to quickly understand if the savings prototypes we’re creating are actually working or if they need to be partially or completely changed.