Our Research
Commonwealth conducts original qualitative and quantitative research with financially vulnerable people—including Black, Latinx, and women-led households who disproportionately experience financial insecurity. We also interview industry experts and academics. We take what we learn and translate findings into actionable insights and practical solutions designed to change systems to work better for financially vulnerable people. We work with community groups, employers, financial services firms, fintechs, policymakers, and workplace solution providers to design and test real-world, practical solutions that not only work for individuals and families, but are also scalable and address the business needs of our partners.
We share the results of our work to provide you with innovative ideas, practical insights, and the tools you need to act. Explore our publications below.
Designing Conversational AI for People Living on Low to Moderate Incomes
The emergence of new technologies has a major impact on financial security and opportunity at every level of society. Too often, however, the design of new technologies does not take into account the needs of and potential benefits for households…
Actionable Insights for Inclusive Product Design
Inclusive product design can be a key lever for improving financial security and opportunity for people traditionally left out of the financial system. Below we share important product insights from our 20+ years of research, design, and testing. Commonwealth’s approach…
Increasing Savable Funds Through Debt Refinancing
One path to increasing emergency savings is through increasing the availability of savable funds by reducing fees, expenses, and the budgetary footprint of existing debt. This brief provides an overview of what we have learned from past savable funds research…
Community Service and Emergency Savings
As part of our continued research to innovate high-quality emergency savings solutions to address this challenge, Commonwealth partnered with Shared Harvest Fund of Los Angeles. The goal of the partnership was to explore the financial, psychological, and community impact of…
529 Account Plans and Emergency Savings
Parents can take advantage of state 529 plans to save for their children’s future education in an account with growth potential. But families with LMI—who have much to gain by increased enrollment in college and other opportunities beyond high school—rarely…
Responding to a Tax Time Crisis and Opportunity
This report was updated in December 2021. Many households living on low-to-moderate incomes rely on an annual infusion of cash from tax refunds. The employment disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic made this even more true for 2020, yet major components…
Emerging Technology for All
As has been the case historically, powerful emerging technologies have the unprecedented potential to shape the future of people’s financial lives, often in ways that will be with us for decades or longer. Emerging technologies—today expressed as technologies such as big…
Invest Forward
The median net wealth of white men is 13x that of Black women. The dramatically lower wealth holdings of LMI women—particularly Black and Latinx women—reflect, in large part, long-standing systemic racism and sexism that excludes these women from traditional pathways…
A Framework for Inclusive Investing
Wealth matters. It provides material, social, civic and psychological benefits, not just for individuals and families, but also for communities and the nation. Yet, wealth disparities in the United States are dramatic and growing. Staggering gaps in wealth by race,…
Closing the Fintech Inclusion Gap
America’s financial system has a long history of disparate access and outcomes for marginalized groups. Our current economic crisis resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic has illuminated long-standing racial, gender, and income gaps that profoundly impact Americans’ financial security. As the…