Daryl Collins

Daryl leads the research efforts of Bankable Frontier Associates, with a specialization in the demand-side dynamics of development finance. She was the principal investigator of the Financial Diaries, 2003-2004 field study based at the University of Cape Town, South Africa and is a co-author of "Portfolios of the Poor". Daryl began her career as an emerging market economist at a New York investment bank before moving to South Africa in the late 1990’s. She ultimately joined the finance faculty of the University of Cape Town, where she leveraged a successful career in portfolio management into research on the financial behavior of the poor. Daryl holds bachelor's and master's degrees in economics from the London School of Economics and a PhD in public policy from New York University.

By Daryl Collins

Blog

Can Digital Linkages Revitalize a Tried and True Savings Model?

What would it take to link savings groups and digital financial services? A team at BFA investigated the potential tradeoffs and benefits which savings groups and potential private sector stakeholders might encounter on this journey.
Blog

Why Financial Diaries to Understand the Needs of Smallholders?

CGAP is working with Bankable Frontier Associates to conduct a financial diaries project on 90 families in Tanzania, Mozambique, and Pakistan.
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What Is Keeping Kenya From Becoming More “Cash Lite”?

A couple of weeks ago, Daryl Collins and her team at BFA introduced granular, intra-day transaction data collected in the summer of 2011 across a sample of 61 urban and rural retail merchants in Kenya. The results starkly showed that cash still dominates the payment transactions in these areas, with mobile money representing being used for not even 1% of transactions. In this blog, they ask the question “What would move more customers and merchants to more cash-lite payment behavior?”
Blog

Is M-PESA Replacing Cash in Kenya?

How far away is Kenya from the goal of cash-lite? Between July and August 2011, Bankable Frontier Associates (BFA) conducted an intensive field study within an urban and a rural pilot area to study the mode and size of intra-day cash flows at the customer-to-merchant interface and the merchant-to-supplier interface. This research finds that despite Kenya’s reputation for being a leader in mobile money, cash is still king.
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Tailoring Formal Financial Products for the Poor

In our last post, we shared findings from the South African, Bangladeshi and Indian Financial Diaries that built the case for formal and informal financial services serving different purposes in the portfolios of the poor. We found that the two should be viewed as complements rather than alternatives to each other.