"Kabootar": Towards Informal, Trustworthy, and Community-Based FinTech for Marginalized Immigrants

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Financial technology (FinTech) platforms often exclude certain countries from their services due to global political conflicts. As a result, immigrants from the neglected countries struggle with transferring money to and from their homeland through formal mechanisms. Instead, they get involved in informal transnational transactions that, while flexible, are often risky and full of hassles. We looked into this issue through an online survey (n=127) and engaged with multiple stakeholders (n=16), including the Iranian immigrant community in Canada, to co-design an application called ‘Kabootar’ that matches senders and receivers of money across borders. In this application, a sender receiver pair is matched with a pertinent pair sending money in the opposite direction. By facilitating two intra-national transactions in local currencies instead of two relatively complicated inter-national transactions, the need for money to cross borders is eliminated while staying within the boundaries of the law. Our user study (n=13) revealed several tensions in users trusting such informal transnational transactions. This work contributes to CSCW, HCI, and social computing’s growing scholarship in personalized and collaborative computing technologies by advocating for a novel design approach based on collaboration and informality and extends their scope to the domain of FinTech for politically marginalized communities.