Axis Bank

Financial inclusion is easy to announce. Much harder to actually understand.

Axis Bank came to us with a clear conviction and an open question. The conviction: that LGBTQIA+ individuals deserved to be seen as full financial citizens. The question: What does that actually mean in practice? Pink Capital was built to find out, to understand how members of the LGBTQIA+ community in India actually think about money. Not in policy terms, but in lived ones.

The research couldn’t be a closed-door survey. Financial decisions in this community are shaped by identity, safety, family acceptance, healthcare needs, and social context, none of which surface cleanly in a traditional research format. So before designing anything, we spent time with NGOs working closely with the community, understanding sensitivities, lived contexts, and what a trustworthy research environment would require.

That groundwork shaped everything that followed. A Pegboard Picnics” format was chosen deliberately, members of the LGBTQIA+ community were invited alongside their support systems, friends, partners, and in some cases family, into an open, communal setting where conversation could happen naturally. The picnic wasn’t incidental to the research. It was the research. At its centre sat a life-size, board-style exercise where participants were given symbolic currency and asked to allocate it across real life priorities: health, safety, appearance, transition-related needs, lifestyle and future planning. The allocation was revealing. The conversations it unlocked were more so.

We compiled these insights into the Pink Capital report, bringing together lived experience, observed behaviour, and systemic gaps into a grounded perspective on financial inclusion. Axis Bank launched it publicly and included it within their annual reporting.

Pegboard handled the research, concept and design for the report.