We find learning effects along both of these dimensions. Most substantively for worker welfare, those receiving direct deposits into a mobile account are less likely to make costly over-the-counter transfers brokered by intermediaries, which are banned by the platform, but extremely common in our worker population. Notably, the treatments do not change the number or frequency of transfers to others. Moreover, the differential impacts of direct deposit relative to account only on illicit fees cannot be explained by differences in transaction costs alone.<sup>5</sup> Thus, direct deposits induce learning about the financial accounts and help to partially mitigate the kinds of consumer protection issues that are common in settings with limited capacity for regulating consumer transactions.

The learning and consumer protection impacts from receiving a payroll account are accompanied by an increase in trust, as measured by whether the respondent would feel comfortable leaving BDT 1,000 (US$12) in an account.<sup>6</sup> This effect is most pronounced for mobile money accounts – the more novel and technologically demanding type of account used in our study. While baseline trust in bank accounts (56%) is substantially higher than trust in mobile money accounts (38%), our intervention eliminates this trust gap almost entirely for individuals who are given a payroll account.

Our treatments also affect real outcomes, including savings and the ability to cope with unanticipated shocks. Receiving wage payments into a formal account causes a large increase in formal and overall savings at all measured time horizons. Specifically, our intervention increases the likelihood of having any savings by 4-11 percentage points and more than doubles the likelihood of individuals having savings in a formal account from a base of 25%. In contrast, simply providing an account has much smaller and often undetectable impacts on savings. Our results suggest that workers both shift resources from informal to formal vehicles and generate new savings by reducing discretionary consumption as a result of receiving direct deposit wage payments. In line with prior research, on account ownership and savings we also find evidence that our treatments improved the ability of workers to smooth consumption. Workers receiving direct deposits report fewer instances where they were unable to mitigate an unforeseen shock due to lack of resources. However, we cannot statistically distinguish these effects from the account only group.

In the second part of our analysis, we examine which characteristics shape an individual’s ability to learn how to optimally use the technology. Rather than search for treatment effect heterogeneity trait-by-trait, we use the machine learning (ML) approach proposed by Chernozhukov et al. (2018) to let the data reveal patterns of heterogeneity. We detect no heterogeneity in our main savings and consumption smoothing outcomes, which suggests equal gains through exposure for all groups. The ML procedure _does_ detect heterogeneous impacts on consumption and consumer learning. Interestingly, the ML tool partitions the sample into “savers” and “learners.” The “savers” cut

> consumers and the “Financial Inclusion Insights Survey” (CGAP, 2018), which finds that 12% of mobile money customers in Bangladesh _noticed_ that they were being overcharged. The actual incidence is likely much higher.

> 5For individuals with their own account, a person-to-person transaction requires visiting an agent to perform a cash in transaction and then executing a simple transfer on the mobile phone. An over-the-counter transaction requires visiting the same agent to make the transfer.

> 6 We use the exchange rate as of May 2014, the start date of our experiment, for all currency conversions.

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