Decision-makers in government, industry, and civil society seeking to improve consumer protection capabilities often lack forums to share and learn from their peers and from researchers. With the goal of promoting knowledge-sharing and collaboration around financial consumer protection themes in emerging markets, IPA's Consumer Protection Research Initiative has launched a Practitioner’s Forum webinar series. This ongoing platform will convene practitioners from regulatory bodies, financial institutions, civil society, and multilateral organizations working in developing countries, and connect them with leading researchers and experts working on topics ranging from financial fraud to consumer redress to consumer lending, to name just a few of the themes the Forum will cover. 

The growing array of digital financial products in developing countries has created new risks for consumers, in particular, in lower-income segments. At the same, these products have also created a wealth of data to monitor and inform policies that better protect clients and improve financial inclusion outcomes over the long term. In response, supervisory bodies and financial institutions have developed in-house expertise to tackle the digital nature of these consumer challenges, and a recent IPA poll of practitioners found great interest in complementing this knowledge with results from quantitative research and opportunities for knowledge-sharing.

In response to this demand from practitioners working in Consumer Protection issues, IPA will convene regular meetings to share emerging research and provide a platform for ongoing learning. Through this curated webinar series, we will provide an overview of how administrative databases, consumer surveys, mystery shopping exercises, and other items in the researcher toolkit can be leveraged to improve organizational learning and consumer protection outcomes. Potential topics for inclusion in the sessions include:

• Leveraging social media data for consumer protection insights
• Complaints data and consumer protection
• Cross-market consumer protection surveys
• Monitoring digital credit data for consumer protection risks

If you are a practitioner (Regulator, Financial Institution, MFI, consumer organization, multilateral) working on Consumer Protection issues in developing countries and are interested in receiving invitations for this webinar series, kindly register your interest here.

Recordings of each meeting will be made available approximately 2-5 business days after each event. For recordings of past webinars and information about registration for future ones, please visit the individual webinar pages below.

• September 29, 2020 - Social Media as a Tool for Consumer Protection Monitoring
• November 25, 2020 - Complaints Data as a Tool for Consumer Protection: Lessons from Uganda
• December 9, 2020 - Building an “Ethical Matrix” for Digital Finance: Beyond Black-Box Algorithms
• February 10-11, 2021 - Consumer Protection Research Initiative Request for Proposals: Info Sessions (including Consumer Protection Survey Results in Kenya, Nigeria, and Uganda)
• October 20, 2021 - Detecting Fraudulent FinTech Apps