Programmes
How payment, credit and financing systems carry, or block, every other transition that depends on someone being able to pay over time, and who is left outside them.
Financial inclusion quietly determines the fate of the others. An electric motorcycle is adopted only if a rider can pay over time. A solar system reaches a household only through pay-as-you-go. Again and again, the Lab's research finds the same thing: the payment layer does more of the work than the technology.
Asset finance and default risk is about matching the instrument to the shape of the cash flow. Working capital for a season, hire-purchase for a decade, project finance for a plant: each has its own tenor, security and covenant, and a mismatch between the instrument and the underlying economics is one of the most reliable predictors of a project stalling. The Lab studies which instruments carry a transition and which quietly transfer the risk to the party least able to bear it.
Who gets included and who does not is the distributional companion to the first. A payment rail can bring millions of previously unbanked users into digital finance and still stop at the point where the most excluded live. The Lab documents who is reached, who stays outside, and how the friction of fees or the shape of a scoring model decides whether inclusion is a real change or an accounting one.
A financing model designed to help can also move risk onto those least able to bear it. The line between the two is invisible in adoption figures and clear only in the field.
The Lab documents it: whether pay-as-you-go genuinely expands opportunity, who is reached and who stays excluded, and how the friction of fees decides whether a transition holds. Our mobility case study shows the double edge, pay-as-you-go is what lets a rider earn into ownership, and the per-transaction fee is the thing they would fix first.
Securitisation in PAYGo solar, and what the collateral really is.
Read →Matching the instrument to the shape of the cash flow.
Read →The decision bar that a subsidy does not move.
Read →The order of constraints on the household side of the deal.
Read →Where a long-horizon risk crosses into a short-horizon mandate on its own.
Read →A classification question that is really a distributional one.
Read →For the full series across the transitions we study, see Articles.
If you are designing or backing an instrument that decides who a transition reaches, tell us the decision you are facing.
