Please join us for the Change Seminar next week on *Tuesday 1/30/2018* in *EEB 003*. *Who:* Samia Ibtasam, PhD Candidate in UW ICTD *What:* *Digital Financial Services and the Impacts of Gender and Learnability on Adoption* *When: *Tuesday, Jan 30th, 12-1pm *Where: EEB 003* *Abstract: * Worldwide, two billion people remain unbanked, the majority of whom reside in resource-constrained environments. While banks have limited reach due to high overhead costs of physical expansion, the global increase in mobile penetration has created opportunities to serve the unbanked using mobile-based Digital Financial Services (DFS). However, there are many factors that affect the understanding, adoption, and use of DFS including learnability of the systems and gender of the users. In this talk, we discuss ways in which previous exposure or domain knowledge improve learnability, and we recommend that metrics for learnability should include effectiveness and help sought, independent of usability. We also identify DFS adoption opportunities such as user readiness, interface improvements, and women's independence. We also discuss the role of gendered barriers in the readiness for and adoption of Digital Financial Services (DFS) and the impact of gendered roles in curtailing or enhancing the same. We present our analysis of the affordances or, lack thereof, in affordability of funds, the authority of transactions, access to technological devices, and agency of social and cultural mobility--all of which are prerequisites to fully utilizing DFS. *Bio: * Samia is a second a second year Ph.D. student in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington and is advised by Richard Anderson. Previously, she worked as the founding co-director of Innovations for Poverty Alleviation Lab (IPAL) at Information Technology University, Pakistan and taught courses like DLab: Global Development, Human Centered Design, Design thinking, and Technology for Global Development. She has been working as a researcher in Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) since 2010. She started her work with speech interfaces for low-literate users with Umar Saif, Roni Rosenfeld, and Agha Ali Raza. At IPAL, she worked to design Maternal, Neonatal and Child Health (MNCH) solutions including information systems, diagnosis applications etc. She also worked with Government of Punjab, Pakistan to redesign the Immunization card and create digital health records for the province of Punjab. Currently, she is using her knowledge of Human-Computer Interaction to work with unbanked people to design and adapt financial technologies and to expand financial inclusion. She is an Acumen Fund Regional Fellow for 2015 and sometimes tweets at @SamiaRazaq.