How do we measure consumers’ experience using financial service agents?

This session will highlight the work carried out under IPA’s Transaction Cost Index research initiative. This work aims to develop methods for monitoring costs consumers face when making digital financial service transactions with agents, including official prices but also unofficial fees charged by agents and non-monetary costs related to service quality and service reliability. This research – led by IPA researchers along with Xavi Gine (World Bank) and Francis Annan (University of California, Berkeley) involved scraping official prices from providers’ websites across 16 countries and conducted mystery shopping visits with agents in Bangladesh, Tanzania, and Uganda. In this session, we will share key findings from this work, including insights into cross-country variation in DFS pricing along with prevalence of consumer protection concerns including agent overcharging, poor service quality, and limited service reliability. We will also share important insights into the practical considerations when measuring these consumer outcomes at scale and the tradeoffs between data collection methods.