Now reading: Overwhelm and inertia – using consumer insights in financial consumer protection supervision

Behavioural Science


Behavioural science seeks to understand the underlying factors that influence judgements and decision-making. These can relate to the individual or to the contextual environment. Someone living with very little income, for example, will find it more difficult to make long-term decisions around savings or accessing credit. Their constrained circumstances will force them to focus on their immediate needs. A good example of this is when low-income adults borrow from informal providers at very high rates for consumption.

Integrating behavioural insights into our data collection and analysis strategies can advance our understanding and predictions of financial behaviour and guide us to design financial services that really help adults achieve their goals. With current innovations in survey design and data collection, we can test these insights quicker and learn faster.

As part of our global i2i programme, we’ve looked into the barriers and opportunities for integrating new sources of data (e.g. social media) into financial service decision-making that can change the way we do business.

Behavioural Science

Encouraging the uptake of health insurance through SMS communication

How to seed connections with customers through SMS and DMs  The last two decades have seen extraordinary growth in digital connectivity, particularly due to the growth in mobile technologies. In sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), for example, 93% of the population had mobile cellular subscriptions in 2020, up from 76% in 2015

Interventions for digital pension contributions
Behavioural Science

Driving digital financial services with behavioural science

After conducting a systematic review of how behavioural science can be used to drive financial inclusion, our team was inspired to continue our efforts in the field. We provided training on the behavioural design process, assisted companies with consumer research and user experience design and conducted an end-to-end behavioural design

Behavioural Science

Building foundations for new behavioural scientists in Africa

Behavioural science studies how people behave and tries to answer why they behave in the way they do. This is done by looking at how people process information and how context affects our decisions. Being aware of their customers’ decision-making processes can help financial services providers develop products that really

Digital app services in sub-Saharan Africa sees promising start
Behavioural Science

Digital app services in sub-Saharan Africa sees promising start

Expanded smartphone access in Africa underpins evolving consumer behaviour. Smartphone uptake in Africa is growing rapidly. GSMA reported that smartphone adoption in sub-Saharan Africa reached 45% in 2018 – nearly half a billion people – and is projected to reach 66% by 2025. To put that further into perspective, 623

South Africa lockdown restrictions
Behavioural Science

Sink or swim: Who is recovering as South Africa eases its lockdown restrictions?

On 1 May 2020, South Africa lowered its lockdown restrictions to Level 4 – a level at which the economy began reopening and several significant restrictions for South African citizens were eased. With some businesses reopening and reduced restrictions on movement, the difficult trade-offs between public health and economic recovery

Behavioural science and Covid19
Behavioural Science

What’s the fuss? The rise of behavioural science for development

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, governments across the world are asking individuals to stay at home. Lockdown, self-isolation and quarantine are becoming a part of our everyday vocabulary as the world tries to slow the spread of the virus. Undoubtedly many of you have received a text message from your government

Behavioural Science

Behavioural science for financial services

We’ve been exploring how financial service providers can translate new insights from behavioural science into the design and delivery of financial services These systematic reviews conducted in 2017 and 2018 sought to identify behavioural interventions that have been proven to influence the credit, saving, insurance or payment decisions of customers. We’ve

Africa’s financial service providers
Behavioural Science

The application of behavioural interventions

As we explore how behavioural science can narrow the gap between customer intention and customer action, we have started to look at examples from specific financial services. Two sectors identified as playing a role in improving the lives of the financially excluded are insurance and formal remittances. Behavioural interventions and