Digital financial services have been one of the most significant development stories of the last two decades. Across sub-Saharan Africa and beyond, DFS has extended financial access to hundreds of millions of people, enabling remittances, savings, small business payments, and emergency transfers in ways that were simply impossible before. But scale brings scrutiny. As adoption deepens and DFS reaches communities with lower digital literacy, less price awareness, and fewer alternatives, the question of what people are actually paying becomes more urgent, not less.

In this episode, we sit down with Francis Annan, Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley, and William Blackmon, Associate Director of IPA’s Financial Inclusion Program, to dig into the economics of why DFS markets get stuck in low transparency equilibria, and what research, tools, and policy are starting to do about it.

Episode Themes

• What DFS has achieved, and where the evidence shows its limits
• The low transparency equilibrium, and why competitive markets get stuck there
• The gap between disclosed and understood, and how it translates into real consumer harm
• What it would take to build a DFS market with transparency as a core objective
• IPA’s new AI-powered transparency tool, and what it makes possible at scale
• What a genuinely transparent DFS market could look like in ten years

About Our Guests

William Blackmon is an Associate Director for IPA’s Financial Inclusion Program, where he oversees a portfolio of research studies including work on mobile money agent networks and consumer protection for digital finance users. He previously worked in IPA’s Kenya office as a Research Coordinator, and prior to joining IPA consulted for the World Bank and served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Tanzania. He holds a Master of Public Policy from Georgetown University.

Francis Annan is an Assistant Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley’s Agricultural and Resource Economics department, a Faculty Research Fellow at the NBER, and the Scientific Lead and Co-Chair of the Retail Finance Distribution (ReFinD) Research Initiative at ISSER in Ghana. His research centres on development economics with a focus on digital financial markets, insurance, and firms across Sub-Saharan Africa (mostly Ghana) and the United States. He holds a PhD in Sustainable Development from Columbia University

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