Addressing Ethical Challenges in a FinTech Startup. With Jeffrey Greger

Response-ability.Tech

Jeffrey Greger is a UX Researcher at Varo Bank. His work focuses on the ethical and organisational challenges that design professionals face as they develop financial services for and with low- to moderate-income communities. He holds a Master’s degree in Applied Anthropology from San José State University.

During our conversation, Jeff explains how he came to anthropology from industrial design and what sparked his interest in financial inclusion.

We discuss his Master’s thesis which explored the “the application of ethnographic research and commercially-derived design approaches in support of financial inclusion” and we touch on why “well-intentioned humanitarian projects often fail to achieve their goals, at times further retrenching social and economic inequalities".

We move on to talk about the working group Jeff and his colleagues created at Varo called PeopleFirst, which aims to avoid the industry logics (insularity, decontextualisation, and tech hubris), and how this community of practice is a way for staff to address ethics in a practical and substantive way.

We loved talking to Jeff and we hope you enjoy the episode.

You can follow Jeff on Twitter and find out more about him at www.jeffreygreger.com.

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Mentioned our conversation:

• Divining a Digital Future: Mess and Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing by Paul Dourish and Genevieve Bell
• Jeff's paper, presented at EPIC 2020: There’s No Playbook for Praxis. Translating Scholarship into Action to Build a More Ethical Bank.
• FairMoney: https://fairnetwork.org
• Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott
• Metcalf, Moss and boyd. Owning Ethics: Corporate Logics, Silicon Valley, and the Institutionalization of Ethics