have only limited information about their customers). However, the provider’s view of its customers’ and non-customers’ access to financial services may be seriously deficient. An interesting comparison between provider surveys and user surveys is obtained by the Genesis/Finmark study of Swaziland mentioned earlier. In a first, provider survey, estimated access percentages for transactions accounts, savings accounts, credit and insurance were obtained by surveying experts and providers. However, as became clear in the subsequent design and implementation of a 600–household survey on usage of financial services, neither the range of providers nor the close substitute services had been adequately covered in the provider survey. Access as measured by household respondents was over twice that measured in the provider survey.<sup>30</sup> The main reason was that the providers and experts surveyed at the provider stage were not sensitized to the importance of nontraditional forms of the services being examined. The banks gave data on full-service transactions accounts, but did not mention ATM-enabled savings accounts; the importance of store credit, of savings at informal savings clubs ( _stokvels_ ) and of insurance with burial societies were all neglected at that stage. Of course these aspects could have been surveyed if they had been explicitly considered, but the process of considering matters from the household’s side, as in designing and piloting a household survey, is far more likely to elicit a fuller understanding of the substitute products and services for certain traditional formal financial sector products.

# **5. Expert surveys.**

Experts can be surveyed in order to obtain information about conditions that are general across the economy as whole or some region of it. Highly relevant examples would be the surveys of Transparency International and the World Bank’s _Doing Business_ team. The respondents to the community-level questionnaires in the LSMS and similar household conditions surveys are also expert respondents in this sense.

The sort of information that can be sought in this way includes such matters as how much it costs and how many days it takes to create a new limited liability company, or to recover on a collateral in the case of a loan default. Specific questions of law would also fall into the same category. Here there is no need to collect information about how many participants and the total value of assets, instead the facts being elicited relate to matters on which any well-informed expert should have a clear opinion based on their knowledge of the field and on which experts should generally agree. Sometimes the matters are rather subjective, but even here the hope is that experts will not differ by much and therefore that there will be no need to poll a large number of experts. As such, expert surveys are relatively rather inexpensive.<sup>31</sup> Expert surveys can be invaluable for

> 30 Thus the provider survey estimated 7.4% of households as having transactions accounts, whereas when ATM transaction-enabled savings accounts were included, 19 per cent of households reported their use.  46 per cent of households reported having savings accounts, compared with 28 per cent as estimated by the provide survey; the main reason was the wide use of informal savings clubs called Stokvels, in addition to the deposits at credit cooperatives which had been recorded in the provider surveys.

> 31 Indeed, the number of experts polled in some well-established expert surveys seems perilously small – leaving the surveys potentially open to manipulation as well as to small sample errors.  According to the _Doing Business_ website, even for a country the size of China, only 10 independent experts provided all of the responses; for five of the eight different themes explored, no more than one independent expert was

21