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

Financial technology (FinTech) platforms often exclude certain countries from their services due to global political conflicts. As a result, immigrants from these 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…