Mobile financial services and financial inclusion: Is it a boon for savings mobilization?

By S. Ouma, Teresa Maureen Odongo, Maureen Were. 2017

327 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract The adoption of mobile telephony to provide financial services in Africa has become instrumental in integrating the hitherto unbanked segments of the population to the mainstream financial systems. This study sought to establish this linkage by examining whether the pervasive use of mobile telephony to provide financial services is a boon for savings mobilization in selected countries in sub Saharan Africa. The findings show that availability and usage of mobile phones to provide financial services promotes the likelihood of saving at the household level. Not only does access to mobile financial services boost the likelihood to save, but also has a significant impact on the amounts saved, perhaps due to the frequency and convenience with which such transactions can be undertaken using a mobile phone. Both forms of savings, that is, basic mobile phone savings stored in the phone and bank integrated mobile savings are likely to be promoted by use of mobile phones. Thus, growing and deepening the scope for mobile phone financial services is an avenue for promoting savings mobilization, especially among the poor and low income groups with constrained access to formal financial services.

Subfields: Accounting, Economics and Econometrics, Media Technology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/81d8a65951c70bb2d928d2a985ac650ea22eada0

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Accounting

1. V. Murinde
2. Karen P. Y. Lai
3. M. Samers
4. Vanesa Pesqué-Cela
5. Yener Altunbaş
6. Ayşegül Demir

In Economics and Econometrics

1. V. Murinde
2. Karen P. Y. Lai
3. M. Samers
4. Vanesa Pesqué-Cela
5. Yener Altunbaş
6. Ayşegül Demir
7. Phil Molyneux

In Media Technology

1. V. Murinde
2. Karen P. Y. Lai
3. M. Samers
4. Vanesa Pesqué-Cela
5. Yener Altunbaş
6. Ayşegül Demir

Citations in the corpus

• Fintech, financial inclusion and income inequality: a quantile regression approach (2020, background): “A recent study by Park and Mercado (2018) suggests that increasing the ‘accessibility’, ‘availability’ and ‘usage’ of financial services (as measured by the number of automated teller machines and commercial bank branches per 100,000 adults; the number of borrowers from, and depositors with, commerc”
• Towards an economic geography of FinTech (2020, methodology): “For other surveys of the use of MFS, see e.g. Alampay et al. (2017); Jack and Suri (2016); IDRC (2018); IMF (2018); Kim et al. (2018); Lenka and Barek (2018); and Ouma et al. (2017).”
• Financial inclusion research around the world: A review (2020, unknown): “In a recent study, Ouma et al. (2017) show that financial innovations like the availability and usage of mobile phones were used to offer financial services that promote savings at the household level and improved the amounts saved, while Chinoda and Kwenda (2019) show that mobile phone innovation…”
• Building financial resilience through financial and digital literacy in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa (2020, unknown): “…the impacts of DFS on saving behavior, finding that mobile money significantly increased the likelihood of savings and money transfers and reduced the propensity to use informal savings channels (Apiors & Suzuki, 2018; Demombynes & Thegeya, 2012; Mbiti & Weil, 2015; Ouma, Odongo, & Were, 2017).”