Financial inclusion, e-payments and economic growth in Nigeria

The paper examined the impacts of financial inclusion and e-payments on economic growth in Nigeria using quarterly data from 2009Q1 to 2021Q4. The paper contributes to the ongoing debate by establishing the growth-inducing e-payment channels and how the drive toward financial inclusion has affected the economy of Nigeria. The paper adopted the principal component analysis, the autoregressive distributed lag, and the Granger-causality techniques to achieve the results. The results showed that financial inclusion and e-payments (except for cheque payments) had a significant long and short-run impact on economic growth. Furthermore, the findings showed that POS payments had the most significant effect on economic growth in Nigeria. This was followed by ATM payments, mobile payments, and web payments respectively. In addition, the results showed that causality runs from real GDP to ATM, and the paper recommends that the monetary authorities should support the development and expansion of financial inclusion and e-payments by providing meaningful institutional changes to support the healthy growth of financial inclusion and e-payments in Nigeria.