Affective core-banking services for microfinance

Abstract

In this paper, we present a mobile phone-based banking system, called ACMB (Affective Cashless Mobile Banking), for microfinance. ACMB is designed to provide banking services to the world's unbanked population of 2.2 billion. To enable interoperability between various microfinance institutions over a heterogeneous network of mobile devices, cell-phone networks and internet services, we define MSDL (Microfinance Service Definition Language) based on WSDL (Web Service Definition Language). MSDL includes a binding for SMS for service queries and utilization. To ensure that the banking service provides an acceptable level of usability and user experience, ACMB incorporates a wellbehaved service interface, which informs the design to create affective banking services based on human emotion models. ACMB was implemented on an Android tablet and evaluated with 147 participants, who performed 804 transactions and exchanged 2,412 SMS messages over a three hour testing period. The results suggest that an ACMB core-banking server on a low-cost mobile device can serve over 15,000 microfinance customers. Therefore, the systems appears to be suitable for most microfinance institutions. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2013.