15:00 - 16:30
Location: G07
Chair/s:
Jordi Brandts
Submission 12
Interactive Text Messaging for Financial Behavior Change: Evidence from Zambia
PS5-G07-01
Presented by: Syon Bhanot
Syon Bhanot 1, Anu Jose 2, Michael King 2, Justin Archer 3
1 Swarthmore College
2 Trinity College, Dublin
3 Women's World Banking
Efforts to increase access to financial services worldwide have led to increases in formal financial inclusion, but these gains do not always translate into welfare-enhancing usage of financial products. This has led researchers and practitioners to seek out behavioral solutions to encourage engagement. In this paper, we report on a field experiment conducted in 2018-2020, with nearly 79,000 bank customers in Zambia, which tested the use of one-way and novel two-way (interactive) text message campaigns to encourage savings and improve loan repayment behavior. Notably, our treatments include conditions that compare both conceptually different approaches (i.e. messaging focused on planning/goal setting vs. just reminding people to save/repay) and different methods of communication (one-way vs. two-way messaging). We have some preliminary results, but analysis is ongoing. Across experimental conditions, we find some evidence of positive treatment effects of the savings-focused text message campaigns on savings attitudes, but not on financial literacy. Furthermore, the loan-focused text intervention had notably positive impacts on loan literacy. However, the effects are more modest on financial behavior outcomes (like loan repayment, savings account balances and the level of account engagement). Furthermore, we find no evidence that interactive (two-way) text messaging campaigns are more effective than one-way text campaigns.