Markhan Hussain and Marolin Solano

Nearly half of Toronto's population was born outside Canada, yet the financial system they enter was built around one kind of life. This research project examines what happens after immigrant women gain formal access to that system, and why access alone is not enough to support long-term financial wellbeing.

The project focuses on immigrant women aged 35 to 54 living in the Greater Toronto Area. This group remains underserved not because services are entirely absent, but because those services were not designed around the realities of their lives. The challenge lies in the distance between entering the financial system and being able to navigate it with confidence, understanding, and long-term purpose. That distance is shaped by overlapping structural conditions including immigration status, labour market precarity, caregiving responsibilities, language barriers, and limited access to trusted financial guidance.

What makes this research distinct is its insistence that exclusion for this group appears less as an absence of products and more as friction: uncertainty about whom to trust, confusion around long-term planning, and the emotional burden of managing money alongside migration and family responsibility. These are not personal failures. They are design failures.

The project translates its findings into a set of guiding principles for designing financial inclusion initiatives that are responsive to lived experience rather than built around an imaginary ideal user. These include trust-based community circles, financial navigation support, care-responsive design, multilingual education, and community-institution partnerships. The core argument is straightforward: expanding who the financial system works for requires a fundamental shift in whose life is centred in the design process. This research is a contribution towards that shift.

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Marolin Solano is a UX Researcher and Experience Designer specializing in digital banking and complex product ecosystems. With over five years of experience, she leads human-centered research that transforms insights into impactful solutions. Her work spans private and public sector innovation, fostering collaboration, empathy, and psychologically safe teams that drive meaningful change.

Markhan (she/her) holds a Master of Design in Strategic Foresight and Innovation from OCAD University. Her career spans product and project management, marketing, customer experience design, festival/event management, and exhibition curation. She brings an interdisciplinary approach grounded in research, systems thinking, and foresight to the work she does across private and public sector organizations.