Heterogeneidad en el uso de los medios de pago y la banca online: un análisis a partir de la encuesta financiera de las familias (2002-2020)
Series: Occasional Papers. 2308.
Author: Laura Crespo, Najiba El Amrani, Carlos Gento and Ernesto Villanueva.
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Summary
In recent years, the banking system has been going through an intensive process of
digitalisation that has affected, inter alia, the way in which citizens relate to financial
entities. Even though this process brings benefits to society in the medium and long run,
its short term effects depend, for example, on how familiar households are with the use of
bank cards and online banking to access the financial services they need .
This paper uses micro data from the Spanish Survey of Household Finances (EFF) for the
period 2002-2020 to analyse how patterns in bank card ownership and use, as well as
online banking usage, by Spanish households have changed over time. The richness of
the EFF data makes it possible to characterise these patterns for different groups of the
population according to their age, education level and income. In addition, the availability
of information over such a long period of time for several birth cohorts allows these
households’ decisions to be analysed over their entire life cycle.
The results of the analysis are as follows. First, bank card ownership and use by households
have spread throughout the period considered, growing especially among households
with lower education levels and incomes. However, even in 2020, several groups of the
population have been identified as still having relatively limited access to this specific
means of payment, especially those who are older and have lower education levels and
lower incomes. Indeed, for example, in 2020, around 20% of those households with a lower
education level did not have any bank cards or, if they did have one, did not use it (around
1,760,000 households).
Secondly, the use of online banking has increased generally for all households between
2002 and 2020, such that, even among those with an education level below secondary,
about half use this way of interacting with banks at least occasionally. However, the spread
of this instrument among households exhibits a high degree of heterogeneity according
to the year of birth of the household head. For example, slightly more than 80% of those
households whose head was born before 1944 did not use online banking in 2020 (around
2,130,000 households).
Finally, this paper examines to what extent the patterns observed in bank card ownership
and use, as well as in the use of online banking, according to household education level,
income and birth year still persist when comparing households with similar demographics
and geographical location. This additional analysis, which includes more household
characteristics, shows, in line with the previous results, that the differences in bank card
ownership and use by household income and education level have decreased between
2002 and 2020 (although bank card ownership is still more limited among households
in the lower income quartile and among those whose head has a lower education level).
Conversely, the differences among households in the use of online banking by income, age
and education level have increased during this period.