continued receiving monthly wage payments in cash. We measure treatment effects on learning and real outcomes using panel of surveys as well as administrative data. We also employ a machine learning approach (Chernozhukov et al. 2018) to understand which types of consumers are able to learn how to use the financial technology in a more effective manner through exposure to payroll accounts. We additionally examine the market-level implications of consumer learning with a complementary audit study that examines how the prevalence of illicit extra charges changes as consumer sophistication in the market increases and information asymmetries between consumers and intermediaries are diminished.

The setting of our experiment has several attractive features that help us trace how individuals engage with accounts and learn to overcome consumer protection challenges associated with a new financial technology. First, electronic payroll accounts are a financial technology with potentially high returns to adoption that is currently being introduced to millions of workers worldwide. At the same time, payroll accounts are susceptible to many common consumer financial protection problems, such as shrouded fees, commission-based incentives, and barriers to use among inexperienced consumers. Second, we measure behaviors and real outcomes, using comprehensive administrative data that captures all financial transactions made by study participants as well as self-reported survey data. Third, we are able to examine consumer learning in a controlled environment that allows us to induce random variation in access as well as incentives to use the technology among individuals in the same workplace environment. We hypothesize that being given an account alone lowers transaction costs and facilitates savings on the _extensive margin_ by relaxing constraints related to account opening. Adding direct deposit wage payments provides an incentive to actively engage with the account on the _intensive margin_ . This variation in the intensity of account use, generated by our experimental design, in turn allows us to identify whether frequent use causes consumers to learn how to use the financial technology in a more efficient and cost-saving manner.

We find compelling evidence of consumer learning as a result of active engagement with the financial technology. Our payroll account treatments increase active engagement with the account and cause consumers to learn how to use the features of the technology to their advantage. While direct deposits lead, mechanically, to more withdrawal and cash-out transactions, participants in the treatment group also make more deposits, send-money transactions, and accumulate higher account balances. We document consumer learning using two main outcomes. Our first outcome, _outside transactions_ , is an indicator for the likelihood of a worker making a transaction outside the workplace, where help with accessing the account is not readily available. Our second learning outcome _direct transactions_ focuses on mobile accounts, and measures whether participants learn to transact through their account without the help of a mobile money agent, thereby sidestepping illicit extra charges which are widespread in our setting and many other markets for consumer finance.<sup>4</sup>

> 4Annan (2019) shows that in Ghana consumers are overcharged in 20% of all mobile money transactions, with female customers being more than 90% more likely to be the victim of financial agent misconduct. See also “Financial Services Agent Survey” (EFINA, 2020), which shows that 40% of financial services agents in Nigeria overcharged

2