CGAP’s new research results show that customers’ concerns about data privacy influence how they interact with financial services to a greater extent than has often been recognized.
Over the past two years, CGAP has been working to understand how much low-income customers care about data privacy and whether their concerns change their behaviors.
In 2019, CGAP’s research showed that, when given a hypothetical choice between different loans, low-income customers generally selected higher interest rate loans if they had stronger privacy protections. As a follow up to the above research, CGAP conducted experiments in Kenya and India to see whether privacy concerns influenced real-life financial decisions.
In both Kenya and India, CGAP found that poor people indeed care about their data privacy and place a financial value on it.
Financial services providers should see the importance of having sound data privacy and protection policies and how this could help attract customers in a competitive environment, the blog authors write.
