Promoting better financial inclusion through web page transformation—a systematic literature review

Most financial institutions, NGOs, and self help groups (SHG) are now using web technology to create outreach. However, for non-mainstream users, like those in rural India, the web application’s non vernacular language, unfamiliar terminology, complex financial models, and user’s own poor digital exposure, together creates a mistrust in the web applications, which tends to result in poor adoption. This inhibits financial literacy initiatives and slows down Financial Inclusion, which is a Millennium Goal. We treat this as a web accessibility problem, and look for prior work on transforming published web content for making it suitable for easy consumption by non-mainstream users. To this end we present a systematic literature review, which forages through 1068 records related to page transformation, to RQ1) uncover existing motivators for transforming an existing web page, RQ2) surface the approaches taken, and RQ3) study their implementation techniques. Our stringent paper selection criteria resulted in a final corpus of n = 72 papers on which we pose 17 sub-questions. Results indicate 21% of them transcoding a structure, layout, flow and presentation; 46% augmenting the content or its meta data; and 11% annotating the content. Results indicate that it is feasible to transform existing web content, on the client side, by 3rd party volunteers. We conclude with the hope that by transforming already published financial content to better suit the vernacular and socio-cultural expectations of various divergent groups of non-mainstream users, we could indeed positively contribute to the larger goals of financial literacy and inclusion.