HKU-SCF FinTech Talk Series – Culture and the Adoption of FinTech in Africa

Speaker: Dr. Jiafu An
Date: 21 April, 2022
Time: 5-6pm Hong Kong Time
Abstract: Mobile money brings substantial benefits to people’s wellbeing. It facilitates risk management through enabling transactions across space, increases capital accumulation by providing safe storage of savings, and helps structural transformation of society by lowering the cost of rural migration. However, despite these benefits, there is a substantial variation in mobile money adoption rates across countries and regions with a country. In this study, we examine whether and how kinship ties affect the adoption of this particular type of financial technology. We find that strong kinship ties improve people’s adoption of mobile money and this result holds across countries, sub-national regions, and people within ethnic homelands. Exploring the channels, we discover that the result is mainly driven by demand for geographically disparate transactions (e.g., remittances).