Most organizations building new payment infrastructure ask how to make it faster or cheaper. The Interledger Foundation (ILF) asks a different question first: Why are so many people still not using it at all? That question has led the Foundation to build a research program that is becoming as central to its work towards expanding access to financial services.
"We can build the most technically sound payment infrastructure in the world, but if we don't understand why people aren't using it, we're solving the wrong problem," says Anna Sheard, Executive Director of the Interledger Foundation. "What we've found repeatedly is that the barriers to financial inclusion aren't always technical. They're about trust, about awareness, about whether a product was designed with a particular community in mind."
That insight is now shaping the organization’s research agenda as it aims to better understand how and why people don't interact with traditional financial systems.
As Payments Go Invisible, Millions Are Being Left Out
The organization's latest research, Out of Sight, Out of Mind: What US payment preferences reveal about the future of finance, is the latest publication from its research agenda. The report, the second in ILF's Future of Digital Finance series, is based on a national survey of 1,004 US consumers and 253 US businesses and finds that more than half of US consumers say they would be open to abandoning cash entirely, and 35% would give up physical payment cards. The findings suggest growing consumer openness to more seamless and less visible forms of payment, although preferences vary across different groups.
The report also notes that 10% of surveyed businesses no longer accept cash, while millions of US households remain unbanked, highlighting the potential exclusion risks associated with increasingly cashless payment environments. “We can tell policymakers that the system isn't working for everyone," Sheard says, "but when we show them that 10% of businesses have stopped accepting cash and there are 5.9 million unbanked households with nowhere to turn as a result, that's a different conversation. The data makes the problem concrete in a way that is harder to dismiss."
Sheard continues, saying: “Research allows us to see why so many people are still excluded from the financial system, and why previous efforts to include them haven't worked.”
For Interledger, the research helps shape the infrastructure, grantmaking and partner projects it supports, with the aim of addressing documented barriers rather than assumed ones. Externally, it gives the organization the evidence it needs to push financial institutions and policymakers toward change.
Going Directly to the Communities the System Misses
Rather than producing industry reports oriented toward existing market participants, ILF conducts primary research in the communities most affected by financial exclusion, communities that rarely appear in the studies that inform policy.
According to Interledger Foundation, its partnership with COMPAS at the University of Oxford includes more than 1,500 face-to-face interviews in Medellín, Colombia. The aim is to understand the lived experience of financial exclusion directly, including the reasons people distrust formal systems, the informal workarounds they rely on, and the specific ways in which existing products fail to fit their lives. “We identify trends that are often outside current research and go deep into the communities most affected,” Sheard explains. “It's about connecting with people and making sure we represent their views in spaces where their voices aren't heard.”
Sheard continues, “Data can be captured, but unless it is contextualized within a deeper understanding of people's experiences, it is unlikely to change how systems work.”
ILF has made closing the loop a principle, meaning findings are shared back with the communities that contributed to them. It is a departure from the standard model of institutional research, in which data flows upward toward funders, policymakers and industry, rarely returning to the people it was drawn from.
Partnering With Academia to Make the Research Stick
According to the Interledger Foundation, it is developing academic partnerships with the University of Oxford and Stanford University to help translate research findings into practical action.
"The rigor of institutionally affiliated research provides expert insight into what the data is telling us," Sheard says. "By working with leading institutions, world-leading experts and applying best practices in research design and analysis, we can translate findings into actionable insights that help organizations and policymakers make more person-centered decisions."
The aim, as Sheard describes it, is to inform the design of systems that better support people who are disadvantaged "not by individual choices, but by the circumstances and systems around them."
Putting the Findings to Work
ILF's research program does not exist in isolation from its technical work. The Foundation's current large-scale projects with Wallet Guru, People's Clearinghouse, and miPlata are being shaped by the evidence from its research, as the organization works to integrate its Interledger Protocol into financial infrastructures that better serve the populations its studies document.
"We want to help organizations building financial infrastructure connect their decisions to the real needs of people using it," Sheard says, "so payments are more accessible, trusted and fairer," Sheard said.
The Interledger Foundation is not the only organization that wants payments to work better, but it’s one of the few that is asking people what "better" means in practice. The 1,500 residents of Medellín being interviewed did not design the financial system they navigate every day. The research is, in part, an attempt to help them redesign it.