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Standard Chartered Bank launches Consumer Price Tracker

By on October 10, 2014

Standard Chartered bank has launched the standard chartered premise consumer price tracker (SC-PCPT) in its effort to improve data collection in Nigeria.
This data collection will  focus primarily on general price trend of food prices across the country with information gathered from Lagos, Kano and Abuja.
Speaking through a conference call at the launch held in Lagos yesterday, the Head, Africa Macro Research Standard Chartered Bank, Ms. Razia Khan said the consumer price tracker is in place to better understand the economy through monitoring food prices and trends as it relates to inflation, GDP and monetary policies.
Khan said: “The absence of timely data which is important for not just portfolio investors because it would aid their understanding of the economy, but the real beneficiaries are for those investors who are already on ground.
She explained that they would be releasing this report once a month, which would collect data from Lagos Kano Abuja.  According to her, they would be  going around taking pictures of food items and manually sending to a database,
noting that  this data collection and price information is done in China and India before  the  bank just extended to Nigeria factoring considering the fact that  it is the largest economy in Africa
“We are not trying to fabricate the official consumer price index (CPI) in Nigeria, we are not saying this is another CPI, for the moment we are only focusing on food prices. For the moment we are just looking to get a snapshot of what is happening to food price trend and what we hope to do is improve the availability of data.”
She  added that: “Unlike the official Nigerian CPI series, which includes data from 10,543 data collectors spread across the country, the SC-PCPT for logistical reasons,  is focused mainly on the key centres of Lagos and Kano. We have increased price observations from Abuja, and this may be extended to other locations over time. However, we do not aim to replicate the data captured in the official Nigeria Bureau of Statistics inflation statistics, which covers goods and services in each state. We believe there is value in providing a snapshot of pricing trends in the key centres, as this information will be available in a timely manner. Given the importance of Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial hub, to the economy, price trends here are important.”
Also speaking at the launch, the Chief Executive Officer, Standard Chartered, Nigeria, Mrs Bola Adesola said that one of the bank’s main focus is to address the gap in Africa market intelligence and that they were conducting this search in collaboration with  Premise Data Corporation to provide more accuracy in its collection.
“More than 350 people are engaged in capturing price information on their smartphones, taking photographs of food staples and their price tags and uploading them to a central database. Where price tags are not on display, information on prices is entered manually. Each week, price information on 21,000 data items is captured in this way. Geo-tracking provides location information. Participants are paid through top-up mobile phone credits. This allows for real-time collation and understanding of price trends and their geographic dispersion, much sooner than it is likely to be available from any other source.”

She stressed that the  SC-PCPT is aimed obtaining accurate price data in Nigeria, which contributes to information asymmetry and to greater uncertainty and costs for market participants by adopting innovative crowdsourcing technology.

 

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