Page 157 - Special Topic Session (STS) - Volume 1

STS422 Robin G. et al.
Over the course of the last decade, Cambodia has experienced rapid
poverty reduction and economic growth. This has been accompanied by an
accelerated rate of financial inclusion. Nearly 59 percent of adults in Cambodia
have access to formal finance (FinScope, 2015) which is dominated by the
domestic payment markets (to which 37 percent have access) and credit
markets (to which 28 percent have access). Like most developing ASEAN
nations, young, rural and low-income Cambodians have significantly less
access to formal finance than the overall adult population. Interestingly,
Cambodian women have slightly greater access to formal financial services (2
percent) than men because they receive more remittances, but they are
underserved in terms of credit and savings.
Access to formal financial services does not necessarily imply efficient and
active use of such services for personal consumption, investment, or business
activities. As many as 22 percent of Cambodian adults have inactive saving
accounts, which have had no deposits or withdrawals in the past one year
(Findex, 2017), and the borrower exit rates from Cambodian Microfinance
deposit institutions (MDIs) vary between 28 percent and 39 percent per annum
(MIX Market, 2015). When financial services are appropriately designed and
used effectively by the under-served population, they can contribute more
strongly to sustainable development goals such as poverty reduction (SDG1),
women’s economic empowerment (SDG5), inclusive economic growth and
decent work (SDG8) (see e.g. ILO, 2015; Buvinic and O Donnel, 2016; Banerjee,
Karlan et al., 2015). This paper investigates for how long customers use a
variety of financial products and services, how efficiently they use them, and
whether those usage patterns differ by gender, age, and location (rural/urban).

2. Methodology
This paper examines customers’ loan and savings mobilization patterns by
using readily available management information system (MIS) data from four
leading Cambodian FSPs: AMK; AMRET; Sathapana Bank; and WB Finance
(formerly Vision Fund). The consolidated dataset contains around 5.4 million
loan and savings records for 2.3 million customers, which represents almost a
quarter of Cambodia’s total adult population in 2015. The study covers around
60 percent of the depositors and 53 percent of the borrowers from the
Cambodian microfinance sector, and around 22 percent of depositors and 38
percent of borrowers from the Cambodian banking sector. The dataset
contains information on customers’ gender, age, province, and their savings
and loans products, allowing us to study long-term financial service usage for
different groups of customers during the period 2010-2015. The big data
study applies descriptive and survival analysis to measure the customer
journey, looking at actual financial service usage patterns by sex, age and other
demographic indicators, from the point people enter the financial institutions

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