balance, account fees, documentation requirements to open an account, characteristics of accounts (limits on no. of withdrawals); factors influencing branch location; for different categories of loans: paperwork requirements, collateral requirements, factors influencing credit decision and collateral decision, use of credit scoring, rates of interest, fees; cost and speed of different forms of retail payments transaction. Fairly full responses have been received from 23 countries. It is intended to expand the coverage to 90 countries.

The raw results of both of these surveys are currently being processed, and further provider-based sources of information are being explored by researchers at the Bank and the Fund.

A lot of information does reside with providers. They know about the pricing, production costs and frequency of use of different services and products (including, for example, the possible cost efficiencies of new modes of service delivery to low income persons). They should also have this information by geographic location of the point of service. Where they may not have much information is on the characteristics of their customers. Indeed, many banks still do not integrate information on different accounts held by the same customer and as such do not know how many different customers they have.

# _Credit registries_

Nevertheless, increasing computerization of banks’ administrative records and the growth of public or private credit registries allows the creation of usable databases. Importantly, these databases can include time series information about rather small firms otherwise costly to survey. For example, A large Indian bank provided a detailed data set to researchers Banerjee and Duflo (2003), containing information about its lending relationships with about two hundred small and medium-sized firms in the period 19962002. More than half of the firms were in the “small” category, having less than $150,000 worth of machinery and equipment assets. This data covered firm characteristics such as turnover, asset size, profits as well as the credit line, utilization and interest rate.

Credit registry-based data allow multiple banking relationships of a single borrowing firm to be tracked.<sup>28</sup> For example, the State Bank of Pakistan was in a position to produce a complete database of the 113,000 business loan accounts relationships 19962002, including information about the fluctuating size of different classes of loan, default rates, and identification of the firm and its directors, potentially allowing a merger of the information with other firm databases.<sup>29</sup>

# _Complementarities between provider and user surveys_

Among the many tasks that can be performed through provider surveys are some that overlap with user surveys at least in regard to the scale of access (even if the providers

> 28 Credit registry data is the basis also of the balance sheet and income statement information for 7 of the 11 European countries in the BACH database.  This data is built on a consistent basis for these countries and for the US and Japan, but it presented in aggregate form for 23 sectors and three size classes.

> 29 See Mian and Khwaja (2004) for a use of this dataset to study apparent patterns of political corruption in lending.

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