PROJECT SUMMARY
ideas42 and Busara Center for Behavioral Economics worked with a major bank and telecommunications company in Nigeria to send behaviorally-informed SMS messages to customers to increase their use of mobile bank accounts.

IMPACT
Effects varied by message and audience; notably, injunctive norm messages led to a 45 percent increase in the number of clients making deposits among females with active accounts, from 0.82% to 1.81%.

RESULTS

Design
ideas42 and the Busara Center for Behavioral Economics designed SMS campaigns that the bank and telecommunications company delivered over the course of a week. (Each sub-group was delivered three messages in total.) The total sample size of the intervention was 75,000 customers.

These designs particularly utilized “social norms”, or the idea that people’s choices are significantly influenced by the behavior of others. Understanding a norm can provide individuals with helpful guidance in situations of uncertainty. One set of messages utilized “injunctive norms”( i.e., what one ought to do) and provided recommended savings levels that customers should have in their account. This was done to set a goal and shift the perception of the account away from an airtime buying vehicle to one that can accumulate savings over time. The amount defined, 2,000 Naira (about $5.50 US dollars), was small, but it was a meaningful increase in savings balance among target users and was intended to give a threshold for “good” savings behavior.

The other set of messages (descriptive norms, i.e., what others are doing) highlighted the widespread usage of the product by customers’ peer groups. The test sample was split into the following segments to see if the messages affected different types of customers in different ways: women vs men, inactive vs active customers, customers with money in their accounts vs customers with zero balance [i.e. funded and unfunded]).

In addition to these two treatment groups and a pure control group that received no messages, each segment also had a treatment group that received standard messages previously sent out by the bank and telecommunication company. This standard message control was included so that researchers could disentangle the effect of receiving any message from receiving a message with social norms framing.

Impact
Injunctive norm messages resulted in increased deposits by women with active accounts with a 0.82 percentage point increase in treatment from a baseline rate of 1.81% in the control (45% increase in treatment compared to the control, p<0.05), as well as by women with inactive accounts (0.08% of inactive women in treatment deposited compared to 0% in control, p<0.10). Injunctive norm messages also increased transfers and/or payments in women’s inactive accounts with a 0.44 percentage point increase in treatment from a baseline rate of 0.09% in the control (approximately a fivefold increase in treatment compared to control, p<0.05). Descriptive norm messages increased deposits by inactive women users; 0.08% of inactive women users in the treatment made a deposit compared to 0% in control (p<0.10). Descriptive norm messages also increased transfers and/or payments by women with inactive accounts with a 0.29 percentage point increase in treatment from a baseline rate of 0.09% in the control (approximately a fourfold increase in treatment compared to control, p<0.05). There were no noticeable differences in behavior among funded or unfunded accounts (e.g., accounts with positive vs zero balance) nor men’s active or inactive accounts compared to the control group.