Getting People to Save "By Default" - Research by Poverty Actions
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A fascinating look at how behavioral economics, specifically "default options," dramatically increased savings rates among telecom employees in Afghanistan. This research underscores a powerful, low-friction lever founders can pull to encourage desired behaviors in users, a principle critical for driving adoption and engagement in early-stage products. Understanding these subtle nudges is key to building impactful fintech solutions.
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Defaults are a powerful, often underutilized, lever for driving behavior change and can be critical for increasing savings rates in financial products.
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Understanding behavioral economics, like the power of "opt-in" defaults, offers practical, low-cost ways to design products that genuinely help users build good habits.
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Even in challenging markets, a simple nudge can significantly increase engagement and adoption of financial services, highlighting the importance of product design over pure market penetration.
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Dan Ariely, famed Beahvioural Economist working with Lemonade, recently wrote on people’s motivation to save when they’re “automatically opted in”. In his post he cited research (December, 2015) on “Mobile-izing Savings With Defaults in Afghanistan” done by Michael Callen, Joshua Blumenstock, Tarek Ghani. The three of them have done extensive research in collaboration with Roshan, Afghanistan’s largest telecom network. Roshan’s employees were A/B Tested to save part of their monthly savings. Half of them were automatically “opted in” to save 5-10% of their monthly salary and the rest were automatically opted out (0% of monthly savings). The research goes on to explain how the study was conducted, what were the limitations to the study and that Roshan’s employee’s might not be indicative of Afghanistan’s poor. The findings from the study are astounding - 45% of people (automatically opted in) chose to continue with the monthly savings compared with those that were automatically opted out. That’s significant, considering how behaviour can be modified/controlled by a simple hack - “Defaults”
