Meet the author of the top graduate paper submitted to FCAC’s National Student Paper Competition 2025
Malick Cisse describes his proposal to help Canadians reduce impulsive spending.
"I want to develop an intervention that restores a sense of free will and control over our spending urges in a smart phone economy."
Malick Cisse
Who I am:
Malick Cisse, MBA candidate, Rotman School of Business, University of Toronto
The problem I want to solve:
I want to improve savings behaviour and long-term financial resilience by reducing impulsive smart phone-based purchases that research shows people later regret. Many people today feel a sense of powerlessness around controlling their urge to spend, and I think this is related to mobile payments and how they encourage impulsiveness. The vested interests that own the digital commerce platforms that run on smartphones have realized that they can use these devices to alter human behaviour in a significant way that drives profits. They do this through nudges, to get individuals to behave in certain ways, and through frictionless transactions that use contactless payments and mobile wallets, so there is nothing to slow down spending. The seamless user experience on smartphones encourages excessive spending.
My why:
I am a power-user of my smartphone, which has essentially become an extension of my personhood. My idea for the National Student Paper Competition was influenced by my professor’s research paper that argues that smartphones lead to cognitive depletion; they erode our working memory, the cognitive reserves we need to resist spending, and our ability to weigh long term trade-offs. Cognitive depletion is a good description of what happens to me when I use my technology and so I decided to explore solutions.
My approach:
I decided to flip the concept of behavioural nudging on its head. Instead of using nudges for commercial purposes, I want to use them to normalize consciousness around money—not in a way that shames people, but in a way that helps make awareness of spending a part of everyday life. I wanted to find an approach that introduces rather than removes friction into spending. But just a small amount of friction: you don't need to make it 10 degrees of friction, because the real issue right now is that the amount of friction with spending is zero. My goal is to create a window for awareness, a pause that makes it possible to reflect and say “OK, maybe I can cut down on my spending a little.”
My solution:
The solution is relatively simple. The idea is to set up “Financial Checkpoints” that introduce a momentary interruption that is triggered during the final stages of a digital purchase. The checkpoint would offer users a snapshot of their recent spending activity alongside insights, such as how much they’ve exceeded their monthly budget. Following this disclosure, users would have the option to impose a brief delay before completing the transaction. For instance, a notification for a user making a late-night purchase might be, “You’ve spent $182 on online orders this week. Would you like to pause for 5 minutes?” My goal with “Financial Checkpoints” is to meet consumers in those fleeting windows when friction is most needed and most likely to succeed. Behavioural interventions like nudging work best when they are delivered during moments of vulnerability or decision pressure, not after the fact. By prompting users to pause and reconsider their choices—either through a brief delay or a clear visualization of their spending patterns—the intervention counteracts the cognitive depletion caused by smartphone use.
My biggest challenge:
Finding companies that are willing to adopt a consumer mindset when it comes to nudging may not be easy because, if anything, they want people to spend more. But speaking for myself, if a business has a transparent ethos around making my life easier rather than trying to control me, I'm more likely than not to support it. So, I think companies will realize that behavioural nudges like “Financial Checkpoints” will give them a competitive advantage. In my paper, I propose four main possible delivery environments for “financial checkpoints”: fintech platforms, mobile operating systems, Buy Now Pay Later services, and Canadian retailers. The ideal would be to have big tech companies that offer payment services integrate “Financial Checkpoints” into their operating systems. The precedent exists: In 2022, Singapore's central bank mandated that all mobile payment providers include real-time spending alerts, resulting in a 14% reduction in impulse transactions.
Last thoughts:
My suggestion for improving savings behaviours by reducing impulsive spending via smartphone technology is not about making people rich, it’s about changing our emotional relationship to money so that we feel like we have some control rather than feeling that we're at the whims of our environment. If you have an application that’s like a buddy helping you out day-to-day with your spending decisions, it can restore a little bit of free will in a world where smartphones are all about impulse.
Read the top graduate paper submitted to the 2025 National Student Paper Competition (PDF).