Mobile money agents are critical actors within the retail finance ecosystem and have been credited for helping with the diffusion, adoption and continued use of mobile money services (Senyo et al 2022a). However, challenges such as dwindling profit margins due to intense competition and market crowding are threatening the profitability of mobile money agent networks. We propose a pilot intervention to incentivise the mobility of agents into “virgin” markets to deliver “village-to-village” mobile money services towards expansion of their business and increased productivity. We intend to undertake the pilot in 2 regions of Ghana: Eastern (which has 33 districts) and Central (which has 22 districts) regions. Our goal is to use the pilot to accomplish the following objectives:
(1) Examine the feasibility of the proposed intervention and understand how agents respond to the strategy of “village-to-village” mobile money services.
(2) Evaluate the potential of the research design towards a full-randomised controlled trial (RCT)
(3) Strengthen our existing relationships within the Ghanaian financial technology and retail finance ecosystem as well as develop new industry networks with auxiliary actors.
If the pilot is successful, we plan to scale it up to a full RCT and these are the research questions:
A) Does transportation incentive promote the mobility of agents into “virgin” markets to deliver “village-to-village” mobile money services?
B) Will the transportation incentive increase the productivity of mobile money agents through higher volumes and values of transactions, number of employees, etc.?
C) Will the intervention lead to a sustainable service delivery to “virgin” markets where agents would end up physically setting up in those identified locations?