Abstract
An important methodological challenge for research on instant payment systems (IPS) is the measurement of use of instant payments. While in principle it would be desirable to access administrative data on payments, in practice it can be challenging to obtain access to private financial data, such as barriers to forming the necessary legal agreements with financial institutions or other data owners. Meanwhile, alternative data collection methods such as surveys can face challenges from recall bias.
The measurement of off-net payments raises even greater challenges for survey data collection than studies on other digital financial services (DFS), because it further challenges the respondent to recall off-net and on-net payments separately. Hence it is an open question to what extent relying on surveys leads to measurement bias relative to administrative data (which may not always be available), and whether there are alternatives to surveys that don’t rely on securing agreements with the parties that own and manage administrative data.
Working with an FSP partner providing access to transaction-level administrative data, this study aims to quantify the measurement bias and behavioral distortions from other data collection methods for the use of instant payments, including: (1) low-frequency survey, (2) high-frequency surveys, and (3) downloading transaction extracts. The study promises to contribute to fundamental insights for research on IPS, and more broadly on data collection in the context of DFS.