What's New and What's Next

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What's New: Project Update | Tracking Prices of Digital Financial Services

Earlier this year, we debuted our price-tracking dashboard to monitor the cost of digital financial services across countries, transaction types, and providers. Now, we’ve deployed a new AI-supported tracking process and expanded coverage to 120 providers across 18 countries. You can dig into prices by country and transaction type (as seen below), trends over time, and transparency across the market. Want to see it in action? Explore the dashboard here.


 

What's Next: Video | 2025 Wrap-up

Last year, we handed the mic to AI for our annual recap. This year, we’re taking it back. Catch our quick video featuring IPA’s Financial Inclusion Program team members as we highlight our 2025 milestones across our work on consumer protection, gender, and interoperable payments—plus a sneak peek at what we’re tackling in 2026. Watch the video here.

What's New: Surveys | Financial Consumer Protection Surveys

Since 2021, IPA has been listening to digital finance users to understand their experiences and the consumer protection challenges they face. We’ve just published results from our 2025 surveys in Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania. Results from seven additional country surveys will be coming soon. In addition, we’ll be sharing cross-country blogs highlighting common themes, key differences, and opportunities to strengthen consumer protection systems across the region. Explore the full findings here.



Anthony Kamwesigye (Research Manager, IPA Financial Inclusion Program and Consumer Protection Research Initiative) and Lina Hochhalter (Senior Research Associate) presenting survey results to Consumer Education Trust in Uganda.
 

What's New: Report | Experimenting for Scalable Ideas

Every year, the Knowledge for Change program at the World Bank publishes its annual report, highlighting achievements from the program and updates from completed and ongoing projects. This year, IPA’s Transaction Cost Index was highlighted, sharing key findings across our Year 1 and Year 2 results. You can read more in the report here.
 

What's Next: New Partnership | IPA Joins Mojaloop Foundation’s Global Partner Program

IPA is excited to partner with the Mojaloop Foundation through their Global Partner Program. Paul Adams, Director of the Financial Inclusion Program, stated, “Together with the Mojaloop Foundation, IPA is excited to bring rigorous evidence to the forefront of inclusive instant payment systems. With system adoption on the rise,  it's critical we know what works, what doesn’t, and the potential risks to consumers. IPA is committed to ensuring, through our extensive research and network, that instant payment systems deliver on their promise of financial inclusion.” Read the full press release here.
 

What's New: Leveraging AI | Using AI for Consumer Protection Monitoring

IPA was recently featured in a post from Anthropic, with Niall Keleher, our Senior Director of Global Research & Data Science, stating, “From tracking financial services pricing across 18 countries to helping ministries in Rwanda, Peru, and the Philippines make sense of siloed data, Claude is integral to how we support governments in delivering more impactful services to their citizens.” Many of our projects are leveraging AI to monitor consumer protection risks, such as our aforementioned price tracking work, our consumer assistance chatbot in the Philippines, and monitoring financial service providers’ compliance with consumer protection regulations in the Philippines.
 

Things that Make Us Think

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Report: Authorized Push Payments (APP) fraud remains a serious threat. In 2024, there were 185,000 UK cases alone, costing over £450 million. New independent research uncovers how criminals exploit consumer vulnerabilities and offers behaviorally informed ideas for stronger protections. Read about it here.

Article: Many banks are overlooking a critical risk today: the financial abuse of vulnerable customers. “The Blind Spot Costing Banks” argues that without stronger safeguards—especially for people under financial or personal stress—banks may be unintentionally enabling harm and reputational risk.

Report: Mobile money is booming, but customer funds aren’t always fully protected, especially when non-bank providers hold the balances. The Alliance for Financial Inclusion’s new report highlights the gaps: weak legal safeguards, limited fund diversification, and uneven oversight. It also outlines practical steps regulators can take to strengthen trust and ensure mobile money customers are protected if a provider fails. Read more here.

Report: The Global Anti-Scam Alliance published its 2025 Global State of Scams report, which consists of 46,000 adults across 42 markets. They found that 73% of the global population is confident in recognizing scams, but 23% lost money. Read the full report here.

Paper: Cerise+SPTF, in collaboration with the Grameen Foundation, researched to test a survey instrument designed to measure the nature and prevalence of financial abuse. They found low rates of financial abuse when women answered yes/no questions about their own experiences, but a high rate of financial abuse when the women answered a qualitative question about financial abuse challenges in their communities. Read the rest of the results here.

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