Digital Financial Services Pricing
Overview
Innovations for Poverty Action’s Digital Financial Services Pricing Project provides monthly data on the prices digital finance providers list on their website for common domestic transactions, including cash-in, cash-out, transfers, and payments. This work is part of IPA’s Consumer Protection Research Initiative.
Costs are a leading driver of take-up and usage of digital financial services (DFS), yet little work has been done to measure these costs systematically. The DFS Pricing Project seeks to fill this gap by conducting an automated collection of DFS pricing across 18 low- and middle-income countries. When possible, we separate provider fees from government taxes.
Data Visualization
Prices by Country and Transaction Type
Consumers face costs when moving money domestically. Primarily, this entails exchanging cash for e-money and vice versa (e.g. cash-in, cash-out), moving money between personal accounts (e.g. on-network transfer, off-network transfer) and paying for goods or services (e.g. merchant payments, utility payments).
The visualization shows the price of various transaction types across countries. Prices are expressed as percentages of the transaction amount. For each country, the values represent a simple average of all providers.
The prices shown reflect the cost of completing a transaction equal to a country-specific reference value. Reference values approximate the median transaction value for each market. To compute, we started with World Bank data on daily mean income per capita for the bottom 40 percent of the population. This was converted to local currency using 2017 Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) rates, then adjusted to current values using local CPI. Finally, we multiplied the result by 15 to approximate a typical transaction size following the multiplier based on IPA’s consumer protection surveys.
Countries without data are due to either unavailable listed fees from provider or technical issues encountered during scraping for the selected transaction type. These are indicated with a text note. In the latter case, fees may have been listed, but were not captured due to technical issues.
Pricing Trends Over Time
Changes in DFS prices are influenced by several key factors, including regulatory and policy changes, market competition and operational costs.
The visualization shows the changes in average prices by country and transaction type. Prices are expressed as percentages of the transaction amount. For each country, the values represent a simple average of all providers.
The prices shown reflect the cost of completing a transaction equal to a country-specific reference value. Reference values approximate the median transaction value for each market. To compute, we started with World Bank data on daily mean income per capita for the bottom 40 percent of the population. This was converted to local currency using 2017 Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) rates, then adjusted to current values using local CPI. Finally, we multiplied the result by 15 to approximate a typical transaction size following the multiplier based on IPA’s consumer protection surveys.
Countries without data are due to either unavailable listed fees from provider or technical issues encountered during scraping for the selected transaction type. These are indicated with a text note. In the latter case, fees may have been listed, but were not captured due to technical issues.
Within-Country Pricing
DFS transactions are typically either free, or follow two pricing structures: (1) slab-based pricing, where transactions within a set range are charged a flat fee; or (2) percentage-based pricing, where fees are set as a consistent percentage of the transaction amount.
This visualization shows how providers in the selected country price the selected transaction type. Prices for all providers in the selected country are shown in orange while prices for other providers in different countries are shown in gray.
In the current beta version, we include data on two providers in Sierra Leone and Paraguay; we include data for just one provider for all other countries.
If no price structure is displayed in orange, this indicates that no providers in the selected country list fees for the selected transaction type.