its impact on real outcomes including an increase in savings on the extensive and intensive margin and the improved ability to mitigate unanticipated shocks.

The benefits of engaging with the financial technology are not evenly distributed in the population. Results from a data-driven machine learning analysis of treatment effect heterogeneity neatly partition our sample into a population of “savers” and a population of “learners”. Individuals with comparatively lower literacy, financial experience, and prior control over household finances benefit from exposure to the technology primarily from accumulating savings but do not necessarily learn to use the financial technology in the most cost-effective manner. Individuals with higher levels of literacy, financial experience, and prior control over household finances, on the other hand, benefit by learning to use the technology more effectively and sidestepping common consumer protection risks. We additionally examine the impact of introducing the financial technology at scale and find suggestive evidence of positive market externalities of consumer learning: inexperienced customers are less likely to face extra charges in areas with higher payroll account adoption. This result should, however, be interpreted with caution, since it is beyond the scope of this study to exogenously vary supply-side factors, such as the degree of local competition between mobile agents.

Our results speak to a larger debate on the optimal targeting of financial consumer protection policies. While we show that there is a substantial amount of learning that occurs naturally, through trial and error, we are cautious to note that these learning benefits are present only for a subset of our population. Looking at the individual characteristics that determine who can benefit from learning-by-doing, our results suggest that training and education interventions would have the highest marginal effect on individuals with low baseline levels of literacy, experience, and prior control over household finances. All of these characteristics are highly correlated with accessing one’s account through an intermediary, which precludes learning-by-doing.

Our findings also lend support to policies that promote consumer learning through automatic payments into an account. We find that channeling wage payments into an account creates a strong incentive to engage with the account and learn about the features of the technology in a way that is not achieved by account opening alone. Indeed, automatic payments into an account are now the default for many government transfer payments (see, for example, Muralidharan et al. 2016 and Bachas et al. 2017). Channeling wage payments into formal accounts is an obvious next step with potentially large positive implications for access to finance and consumer learning in low and middle-income countries where wage payments are still made predominantly in cash.

One remaining question, given the benefits of payroll accounts and the costs of cash, is why the market has not stepped in to expand the availability of payroll accounts at scale. While we note that payroll accounts have expanded rapidly since our intervention, our results also point to several barriers that could be at play. First, employers may fear resistance from employees due to a lack of trust in the technology. Indeed our results document very low levels of trust at baseline, which improve as consumers interact with the technology on a regular basis. Second, an important barrier 27