Creating an innovation learning agenda for FMCG supply-chain payments

In 2019, the Better Than Cash Alliance (BTCA) led research on scaling payment digitization for small merchants across the supply chain of Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) firms. These FMCG companies primarily pay small retailers in cash because few have access to bank accounts or electronic payments. BTCA sought Digital Disruptions’ support to define a short-term approach and long-term vision for FMCG companies to engage in a key Latin American market, with a particular focus on increasing the adoption of digital payments among merchants.

Approach & Outcome

Digital Disruptions took a collaborative and design-inspired approach to generate an aligned view among BTCA team members for an ideal vision for the program, including nearer-term tactics to implement. The process involved BTCA members envisioning themselves in a hypothetical future-state (about two years from the start of the engagement) and individually answering open-ended questions “looking back” on various aspects of the program. The guidance provided to the BTCA for this exercise was not to restrict themselves to the feasibility from BTCA’s past efforts, but rather what would be desirable in an ideal world.

After synthesizing the responses and facilitating a session with the BTCA team, Digital Disruptions then drafted a long-term vision, success categories and metrics, and short-term activities to gain rapid momentum. Additionally, we prepared a plausible “Learning Agenda” so that individual experiments in the field would help address key hypotheses that the program sought to answer, which would benefit the wider FMCG community and policymakers at-large.