Page 158 - Special Topic Session (STS) - Volume 1

STS422 Robin G. et al.
to the point of their exit. Insights were further triangulated with Cambodia’s
National Financial Inclusion Survey (FinScope 2015) (n=3150) as well as
feedback from over 80 FSP experts to identify why certain underlying patterns
occurred.

3. Results
The study finds significant gender and youth gaps in average loans and
savings mobilization in Cambodia. While Cambodian men and women have
almost equal access to formal financial services, the loan and savings
mobilization is higher among men (the gender gap in loan amounts is $825
and in savings is $658). This gender gap may be explained by existing gender
inequalities in wages and incomes, access to assets and employment activities
in Cambodia (see e.g. ADB, 2013) and the fact that women have a preference
for informal savings schemes (FinScope, 2015) and group loans. Cambodian
youth (defined as those between 18-25 for the purposes of this study) have
20 percent lower access to formal finance than older adults, and they also save
and borrow less (the youth gap in loans is $567 and in savings is $215). Despite
stronger customer loyalty, youth and women received smaller individual loans
due to lack of credit history and collateral and a perceived lack of business
skills and experience.
Nearly 70 percent of customers had low-value or “passive savings
2
3
accounts” with deposit balances below $5. Results of survival analysis show
that the level of a customer’s savings is most likely to fall below $5 within the
first year of the account opening (see figure 1a). Descriptive analysis showed
that the percentage of passive accounts was higher among depositors with
credit-linked savings (72 percent) than with voluntary accounts (45 percent),
indicating that linking credit and savings accounts did not advance savings
mobilization. Women (75 percent) and older adults (72 percent) have a
significantly higher proportion of passive accounts than men (59 percent) and
youth (47 per cent) respectively. Figure 2 below demonstrates that female
depositors have a higher proportion of passive accounts than men across most
provinces of Cambodia, as shown by the larger red slices on the lef-hand fgure.
Men mobilize savings better than women in most provinces (as shown by
the larger yellow slices on the right-hand fgure). Similarly, Figure 3

2 To analyse savings mobilisation of customers, we define accounts with savings below 5US$
as passive accounts. This threshold is a reasonable proxy for savings account dormancy as
over 80 per cent of the dormant savings accounts had savings balances less than $5.
3 Originating from medical science, survival analysis has recently been widely applied in the
field of economics, finance and engineering, amongst others. Survival analysis for example is
used to measure the survival-time (or death) of cancer patients after diagnosis or to measure
the ‘period of unemployment’ after providing a training to a group of unemployed individuals.

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