Trust in Technology Starts with Trust in People: Insights on Tech & Financial Inclusion
For our third and final conversation, we turned to the people at the center of this work: immigrant families navigating financial hardship in real time.
This webinar drew on MAF’s latest research report, conducted in partnership with the Remitly Foundation. It shares insights from one-on-one interviews, community conversations in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Chicago, and hands-on user testing.
What we set out to understand was how immigrant and low-income communities are overcoming financial hardship right now, and what it actually takes to build and maintain trust along the way.
What we found was both humbling and clarifying: technology alone is rarely the starting point. People are.
The Moment We’re In
Before diving into the findings, it’s worth naming the context. This research didn’t happen in a vacuum. Many of the conversations took place during a period of intensifying immigration enforcement, rising costs of living, and deep income instability.
When MAF sent a poll to clients who had participated in immigration-related programs, over 1,000 families responded. More than three-quarters said their mobility had been limited in some way. More than three-quarters reported losing income. More than half said they were pulling back from extracurriculars and community activities for their children.
This is the reality that shapes every financial decision these families make. As MAF CEO José Quiñonez grounded us at the start of the webinar, our mission is to help people become visible, active, and successful in their financial lives; and that means starting with the fullness of their reality, not a flattened median.
When we look at the data, two-thirds of MAF’s clients are below 80% of the area median income. Nearly two-thirds are below 50% AMI. Over the last decade, about one in four MAF clients has been below 30% AMI. These are people for whom every financial decision carries weight—and for whom the conventional financial marketplace has rarely built anything with them in mind.
Three Things We Learned
From hours of interviews and community conversations, three insights emerged that frame how immigrant families are navigating this moment.
1. People adopt new strategies in the face of immediate stressors.
Immigrant families are not waiting for perfect conditions. When faced with income loss, rising housing costs, or limited employment options due to immigration enforcement, people move. They adapt. They find a way.
What we heard most often (from more than half of all participants) was a turn toward entrepreneurship. Not the aspirational kind you see celebrated in the media, but entrepreneurship born from necessity. A fundamental desire for stability. A way to access income and build something when institutional doors are closed.
As one participant put it:
“Since I’m no longer working, the only way I could think to make more money was to sell things. I thought maybe I could start my own business.”
Partners confirmed the same pattern. “The good thing is that, at least with entrepreneurship, people can start a business, no matter if they have or they don’t have work documentation,” one partner shared. Organizations like Lift LA and the Resurrection Project described adding new educational tracks and training sessions entirely around entrepreneurship, not because it was a trend, but because that’s where their communities were going.
Alongside entrepreneurship, participants described turning to gig work (DoorDash, Grubhub, Uber), peer lending, and other practical tools for generating income. Technology wasn’t adopted because it was new or interesting. It was adopted because it met a real, present need.
2. People are the most effective alleviators of barriers.
Even when strategies exist, barriers get in the way. Language hurdles. Unreliable internet. No smartphone. Credit invisibility. Fear of data exposure. The cognitive toll of poverty itself—what researchers describe as the mental bandwidth consumed when every dollar is spoken for before it arrives.
These barriers are real, and they are intersectional. But what the research showed, again and again, was that people help other people through them.
Children step in as tech translators for parents. Friends who immigrated earlier share what worked and what didn’t. Peer lending (something MAF has supported through Lending Circles for over a decade) remains a powerful and trusted financial instrument. Community-based organizations like schools, churches, and local nonprofits serve as judgment-free spaces where any question is welcome.
And sometimes the most unexpected alleviator was a bank.
Participants spoke warmly and specifically about the staff at their local branches—people who were culturally competent, who often spoke Spanish, who walked them through apps and explained financial instruments without condescension. As one participant shared:
“When I went to Wells Fargo, I found a Venezuelan, so it was in Spanish, so it was a little bit easier, and they helped me a lot.”
These weren’t transactional relationships. In participants’ eyes, these bank employees were community members.
One more category emerged as an “honorable mention,” as R&D Director Arvind Bala described it: parasocial relationships. Participants described following creators on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube who spoke to their experience in culturally resonant ways. This was powerful and also a double-edged sword. Misinformation spread through these same channels, and partners described regularly having to level-set when clients arrived with advice from an influencer that wasn’t quite right. Trust built in digital spaces is real. But it is not always complete.
The broader point is that people are resourceful, relational, and seldom passive. They reach toward strategies, toward people, toward anything that helps them move forward.
3. Trust begets trust.
This was the insight that tied everything together, and the one that felt most important to name clearly.
Trust doesn’t start with an app. It starts with a person.
When someone walks a neighbor through Zelle, or a bank teller explains a mobile app in Spanish, or a community org connects someone to a resource they didn’t know existed, that positive experience doesn’t just solve a problem in the moment. It opens a door. It lowers the threshold for the next unfamiliar thing.
The story of Zelle illustrates this well. Participants weren’t drawn to it because it was the flashiest option. They trusted it because it was embedded in the banking app they already used, introduced by staff they already had a relationship with, and validated by family members and neighbors. The bank’s trust carried. Their community’s endorsement carried. Each layer of positive experience made the next one easier.
Compare that to how participants described Cash App. The concern wasn’t that it was untrustworthy. It was that it felt too easy. When it comes to money, a little friction signals security. Too little friction, and people wonder what’s missing. This is a design lesson worth sitting with: ease of use is not always the goal. The right amount of friction can be what makes people feel safe.
As Arvind summarized it: “Trust begets trust. Future adoption is so much easier when it comes from an existing foundation of trust.”
From Research to Practice: What This Means for MyMAF
Findings don’t stay on paper at MAF. They move into how we design.
The MyMAF app was built and continues to evolve with these insights at its core. Trust in technology starts with trust in people, so many participants told us they were willing to try MyMAF because they already trusted MAF. Some had been through Lending Circles. Others had worked with MAF staff directly. That organizational trust became technological trust.
The design choices reflect this. MyMAF works across devices without requiring a separate download, because access shouldn’t depend on what hardware someone has. The experience is available in multiple languages, not as a translation afterthought, but as a foundational commitment to letting people engage comfortably and confidently. And the financial goals embedded in the app aren’t generic. They were built from what participants told us they were actually working toward: immigration-related expenses, credit building, and important family milestones.
Community input isn’t a phase of this work. It’s the work. Lasting innovation doesn’t begin with technology; it begins with listening. And when we listen deeply, build trust, and design alongside communities, we create solutions that people not only use but genuinely value.
What Comes Next
This series has asked three connected questions: What does it take to listen? What do partners see that others miss? And how do immigrant communities navigate the technology meant to serve them?
The answers are linked. Listening creates the conditions for trust. Trust creates the conditions for adoption. Adoption, when it’s rooted in real relationships and genuine need, creates the conditions for something that actually works.
The research also opened new questions. Technology is moving fast. AI has changed significantly even since these conversations happened. Immigration policy continues to shift. Arvind named it directly: “We need to keep our finger on the pulse to understand how those experiences evolve and to make sure our technology evolves with the lives of our communities.”
That ongoing commitment to listening, testing, and adapting is what we take forward from this series.
Read the full report to explore the complete research findings and recommendations.
Watch the webinar recording below to hear directly from MAF’s research team:
