The Importance of Language and Visual Cues

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Designing financial products to work in multiple languages is a significant cultural requirement in parts of Africa. In Nigeria, for instance, only about half of the population speaks English, even though it’s the country’s official language. In northern Nigeria, there are more Hausa speakers than English, while Nigerian pidgin is the preferred vernacular in the south. To emphasize this point, Wazobia FM, a station that broadcasts in pidgin, has been recognized as the most listened-to radio station in Nigeria. Across the continent, languages vary by region, country and community, creating a vast tapestry of over 2,000 distinct languages – compared to under 100 languages spoken in Europe.

To leverage this challenge to their advantage, fintech and digital products targeting African users must recognize the potential impact of speaking a shared language with their target customers, particularly in building trust. The advantages of this approach can be seen in the momentum of agency banking, which has proven to be a relatively successful model for driving financial inclusion in the region. This success is arguably hinged on the closeness of banking agents to the end-users: The agents are able to italy whatsapp number data build rapport and trust with customers due to their shared language and culture, and to the fact that they are members of the same communities.

But it’s not enough for a financial provider to simply offer their products or services in a market’s primary languages and expect customers to understand them. Many of Africa’s financially excluded and underserved populations have little or no formal education in their country’s official (colonial) languages, such as English and French. For context, sub-Saharan Africa’s literacy rate stands at about 66%, with countries like Mali having rates as low as 31%. This makes voice technology in indigenous languages an efficient method of localization that can enable providers to connect with unlettered audiences. Interactive voice response (IVR) systems are a good example of this approach. Users can easily call service lines to carry out financial transactions by following voice prompts in the languages they are familiar with. This model is gaining traction in India, where the Department of Posts recently launched a new IVR facility for Post Office Savings Bank account holders which allows them to perform basic transactions with options for English and Hindi.

Beyond voice technology, visual cues are also crucial for the localization of financial technology products. Humans are wired to respond to visual cues, and this informs customers’ usage – and providers’ design – of financial products. For these products to drive financial inclusion among local markets in Africa, however, they need to be locally relevant. For example, to unlettered users in parts of Ghana, the Cedi sign (¢) could better represent money than the dollar sign ($), although the dollar is often seen as a universal representation of money.