Encouraging Digital Financial Technology Adoption during a Crisis: Experimental Evidence from Ghana

Can adoption of digital financial technologies during a crisis assist households with managing their finances? We randomly assigned 15,000 bank clients in Ghana to receive voice messages to their mobile phones encouraging the adoption of mobile banking services, a technology linking a bank account and mobile phone, during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using administrative data, we find that encouragement increased the monthly use of mobile banking services by 6.3 percentage points in the short term, triple the control group mean, with effects persisting 9 months after the start of the intervention. Those who received mobile banking encouragement were 2.4 percentage points (8%) more likely to make loan repayments on time and 2 percentage points (11%) more likely to have a bank loan 9 months later, suggesting mobile banking services assisted households with carrying out financial transactions during the crisis.