Financial Inclusion and Electronic Payments

Abstract

Financial inclusion is a public policy objective that fosters development through access to financial services for all. Financial inclusion can be defined as access, usage and quality of financial services. Inclusion of individuals and small enterprises has made considerable progress but it has also reached excesses in some situations. Regulatory changes and technological innovation have helped the expansion of financial services. Our contribution to the literature is threefold. First, we expand the large body of research that focuses on financial inclusion based on access to credit, through our analysis of payments. We provide an unique analysis of the quality dimension of payments, which we define as a catalyst between the access and usage dimensions. Second, we provide a detailed analysis of the Brazilian payment market, which transacts close to $400bn per year, in the scarce literature on developing countries. Third, we isolate the determinants of electronic payments through statistical methods, including a principal component analysis and auto regressive models (SARIMA, SARIMAX), which have not yet been used by researchers. We find that four macro characteristics have a strong explanatory power: bank credit card lending, active population, retail sales and cash-in-circulation. Surprisingly, we find that cash-in-circulation presents a positive relationship with electronic payments, suggesting a possible distrust of citizens towards the banking system, high levels of informality, and shedding a new light on the precautionary principle described by Keynes. Our analysis is based on monthly deflated card payment data for Brazil from January 2007 to March 2017.