That’s right! The idea for NALA was totally shaped by these conversations. I wrote a short post about how NALA was born that provides a bit of insight into some of these interviews (https://medium.com/nala-money/how-we-built-nala-e40a0e3e9ac3).

The most obvious take-away was that sending money via USSD really isn’t user friendly at all (takes a long time, have to memorize unique and sometimes complex payment codes, etc.).

Another take-away was that users have multiple sim cards (each 'bank' account may be tied with a different sim card). So having one interface to actually make and manage payments could prove extremely valuable.

I was curious whether the interviews were conducted directly for NALA, or as part of other research that proved useful as they started to hone in on creating NALA.

great question, they were actually out of curiosity to learn to build something in fintech.

Interviews themselves are really hard, I struggled to not ask 'leading questions' when I wanted the interviewee to say what I wanted to hear vs what was going to be an even more valuable insight to us.