Daryl Collins

Daryl Collins is a director leading the research efforts of Bankable Frontiers, with a specialization in the demand-side dynamics of development finance. She was the principal investigator of the Financial Diaries, 2003-2004 field study based at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. This study generated over a year’s worth of daily data on the financial cash flows of poor households (see www.financialdiaries.com for findings and more detail). The results of the Financial Diaries have been combined with similar studies undertaken in India and Bangladesh to create a book, Portfolios of the Poor, which will be published by Princeton University Press in May 2009.

Daryl began her career as an emerging market economist at a New York investment bank before moving to South Africa in the late 1990’s. She ultimately joined the finance faculty of the University of Cape Town, where she leveraged a successful career in portfolio management into research on the financial behavior of the poor. Daryl holds bachelors and masters degrees in economics from the London School of Economics, and she is currently completing doctoral work at New York University.