What Do Borrower Workarounds Reveal? User-Derived Design Implications for Digital Finance in Indonesian Crowdlending

This study examines how Indonesian crowdlending borrowers navigate tensions among access, risk, and trust. It draws on interviews with 30 borrowersand uses an abductive, constructivist grounded-theory approach, with substantial intercoder reliability (Cohen’s kappa = 0.775). Four categories emerged: Paradoxical Necessity, Comparative Advantage Calculation, Risk-Exposure Management, and Institutional Legitimacy Navigation. Borrowers accommodate these tensions through temporal separation, cautious engagement, and legitimacy assessment. They preserve access by addressing immediate needs, comparing credit options, adjusting repayment practices after adverse experiences, and weighing regulatory status alongside platform terms and personal experience. Borrowers with longer or more adverse platform histories described more deliberate comparison, repayment management, and legitimacy assessment. However, the cross-sectional design cannot determine whether these differences reflect development over time or preexisting differences. Borrower workarounds indicate potential unmet design needs, especially in transparency, risk communication, and trust calibration, and provide borrower-derived implications for platform design and regulatory oversight.