Contactless Payments and the Payment Divide

We analyzed payment habits using existing data and conducting online discrete choice experiments with consumers and small business owners to understand payment access and new preferences that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic. Each member of our team or subgroups focused on a particular aspect that affects adoption or impact. Undergraduate students were recruited through the Center for Undergraduate Research Opportunities (CURO).

Extramural Funding

Several students received CURO research stipends, Graduate Assistantships or conference travel scholarships supported by extramural funding.

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Sophia T. Anong, Ph.D

Sophia T. Anong, Ph.D

I enjoy collaborating with students and established researchers from different disciplines and backgrounds. The majority of the undergraduate student researchers have spent months canvassing existing datasets in the Understanding America Study, Global Findex, from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the US Payment Forum, and the US Census. They have contributed survey questions and design input for an online consumer study incorporating a discrete choice experiment on remote and POS payment choices during the pandemic. Findings will be rolled out through data visualization, presentations, and articles.

I am grateful for all my collaborators and various sources of research funding. Most recently, I became the lead investigator of a Facebook-funded project about the impact of contactless payments on small business owners. Our goal is to conduct baseline and outcome surveys on the effect of training and messaging on the adoption and/or expansion of contactless payments by small business owners in the state of Georgia.

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Photo by Dorothy Kozlowski

Joan Koonce, Ph.D.

Joan Koonce, Ph.D.

I am a co-investigator on a Facebook-funded project about the impact of contactless payments on small business owners. Our goal is to conduct baseline and outcome surveys on the effect of training interventions on the adoption and/or expansion of contactless payments by the self-employed and small business owners in the state of Georgia.

As an experienced Extension Specialist, my role is to coordinate with our partners such as the Small Business Development Center to deploy messaging and training interventions to especially reach marginalized minority and low-income owners. Findings will help to develop targeted programs to help improve digital literacy in financial management.

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jkoonce@uga.edu

Octavio Aguilar
Octavio Aguilar

My name is Octavio Aguilar, and I am a Junior at the University of Georgia pursuing a dual degree in Consumer Economics with an emphasis in Applied Consumer Analytics. My personal contribution and purpose within this study will be to analyze how contactless payment during COVID-19 has affected consumer spending with attention to specific demographics. My research will focus on identifying domestic trends present in low-income and high-income consumers. With the utilization of statistical tools, I hope to gather data that will help form a better understanding of the impact COVID-19 has had on consumers and the usage of contactless payments.

2021 UGA Center for Undergraduate Research Opportunities Symposium

Food Insecurity by Payment Behavior

Food Insecurity by Race during COVID-19

Late Housing Payment by Payment Behavior

Late Housing Payments by Race during COVID-19

Coping with Unexpected $400 expense during COVID

Coping with Unexpected $2,000 expense during COVID

Payment Behavior by Income Quintile

EIP (stimulus payments) by Payment Behavior

Abhideep Budda

Abhideep Budda

My name is Abhideep Budda and I am currently a second year undergraduate student at the University of Georgia studying Management Information Systems and I expect to graduate in May 2023. My research is a study of how effective contactless payment infrastructure is in influencing purchasing habits. I focus on point of sale (POS) systems at the retail level. Therefore, I have been involved with designing the discrete consumer choice experience for the consumer online study. I am also on the Facebook project where I assist with developing appropriate questions for the initial scoping study as well as the baseline survey.

In Fall 2020, from literature and survey reviews, I helped design a discrete choice experiment for consumers using these two store scenarios. The choice sets test consumer behavior as it pertains to contactless payments. I also helped compile survey questions for the consumer baseline study.

Anshu Garg

Anshu Garg

My name is Anshu Garg, and I am currently a senior at the University of Georgia. I am majoring in Psychology with a Neuroscience Emphasis and double minoring in Public Health and Cognitive Science. I hope to attend law school after I graduate. Therefore, with my pre-law background, I am focusing on tracking contactless payment policies. My purpose will be to first compare the reopening guidelines for businesses across different states in the US. These fluid reopening policies will be my primary focus, and by analyzing trends in policies and guidelines, I hope to be able to make predictions on how policies on contactless commerce will be developed into laws in the next several years. I will compare what is and is not working in order to prognosticate how financial technology policy will change our future, especially during the course of the current pandemic.

View an interactive map that I created showing U.S. policy information for contactless payments and cashless laws. It is derived from a policy matrix database I constructed from policy research I conducted throughout the Fall 2020 semester.

Miranda Gomez-Puche
Miranda Gomez-Puche

I am Miranda Gomez-Puche and I am currently a 4th-year student in the University of Georgia, majoring in Economics and International Business with a minor in German. My research is a study of how contactless payments affect spending in both developed and developing countries. These payments are defined as the use of cards and mobile devices through touch-free and remote/in-proximity devices such as POS readers, and Mobile Money. My hypotheses are that contactless payments enable financial inclusion and an increase in consumer spending across countries during and after the pandemic. The countries I will include in my study are Venezuela, Nigeria, Ghana, UK, Australia, South Korea, USA, Brazil, and Canada.

Payment Methods and Borrowing

Payment Methods and Saving

Kiet Le
Kiet Le

My name is Kiet Le and I am from Vietnam. I major in Finance with a minor in geography. I am going to graduate in December 2020. In this research project, I will direct my attention to studying the impacts of Covid-19 on the low-income unbanked population in regard to their lack of access to financial technology as a means to purchase food over the course of on-going impositions of stay-at-home orders and community containment measures. My hypothesis is that unbanked people who rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) appropriate a larger portion of their savings to buying groceries during the pandemic as a direct result of their inability to redeem welfare benefits for online grocery shopping and prepaid delivery.

Winner - 2021 FINRA/ACCI Undergraduate Student Poster Competition (shared with Gabrielle Martin)

(Video presentation)

Shihan Lyu
Shihan Lyu

My name is Shihan Lyu, I’m currently a fifth year Statistics student in University of Georgia and I will graduate in May 2021. My main work is to gather the latest consumer payment data and to use Stata to analyze how the coronavirus influenced the choice of payment in people’s daily lives. I also link COVID payment shifts with payment habit trends from prior COVID using the Federal Reserve Bank's Survey of Consumer Payment Choice and track the evolving contactless payments trend. I also use the ArcGIS to visualize people's payment behavior data on the map in order to have a better understanding of the influence brought by COVID-19 to people's payment behavior in their daily lives.

Amber Maduike

Amber Maduike

My name is Amber Maduike, I am currently a 4th year double majoring in Biology and Psychology with an emphasis in Neuroscience on the Pre-Medicine track. I will be graduating in May 2021. My research is primarily focused on addressing the ways COVID-19 has impacted minority consumers and small business owners. My research involves measuring the impact that financial strain has had on mental health especially on consumers and small business owners, coupled with health disparities, before and after COVID-19. Additionally, I am conducting research on socioeconomic inequalities in communities and its impact on the use of fintech products by minority consumers and small business owners. Lastly, I aim to address how behavioral economics and cognitive reasoning in decision-making processes of individuals relate to the payment divide among consumers and small businesses. Overall, I aim to utilize statistical tools to analyze my data as well as ARCGIS for visualization purposes in order to further address my primary focus; the ways in which COVID-19 has impacted minority consumers and small business owners.

Gabrielle Martin
Gabrielle Martin

My name is Gabrielle Martin and I am currently a 3rd year undergraduate student at the University of Georgia. I am studying as a Biological Science major in the College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences with a Pre-Dental intent. During this research study, I will be focusing on the use of contactless payments and fintech products during COVID-19 among minorities in the unbanked population. More specifically, I will be analyzing the disparities within these communities, such as the lack of financial inclusion for Black and Hispanic Americans in the financial system.

Fintech payments by Banked and Unbanked U.S. Adults in 2019

Winner - 2021 FINRA/ACCI Undergraduate Student Poster Competition (shared with Kiet Le)

(Video presentation)

Neha Matavalam
Neha Matavalam

My name is Neha Matavalam, and I am a junior at the University of Georgia majoring in Finance and Management Information Systems. I will be graduating in May 2022. I will be analyzing contactless payment habits by focusing on the use of contactless payments before and during the pandemic. I’ll also be evaluating the linkage between consumers’ experience with digital banking and their perception of contactless payments. I hope to better understand the types of consumers who use contactless payments and the long-term effects the pandemic will have on consumer payment preferences.

2021 UGA Center for Undergraduate Research Opportunities symposium

Award Recipient - 2021 FINRA/ACCI Undergraduate Student Poster Competition

Video Presentation

Chidalu Ogbuka
Chidalu Ogbuka

My name is Chidalu Ogbuka and I am a 4th year at the University of Georgia. I will be graduating in May 2021. I am a Biological Sciences major with minors in Spanish and Biology. In this research study, my main work is to study the impact of COVID-19 on minority groups in America. In regards to the minority population making up majority of COVID-19 cases in America, I focus primarily on the following issues: 1) how the disparities in living conditions, work circumstances, access to health care, and underlying health conditions impact different minority groups, 2) how the different disparities impact their risk of getting COVID-19, and 3) how these disparities affect the way minority groups use FinTech and banking products before and after the pandemic.

2021 UGA Center for Undergraduate Research Opportunities Symposium

Nishant Patel

Nishant Patel

My name is Nishant Patel and I am a third-year undergraduate student at the University of Georgia. I am studying Finance and Management Information Systems with an Emphasis in Data Analytics and will graduate in May 2022. I am studying the steps taken by small businesses that have transitioned to contactless payment systems and contactless services. I have helped design the discrete choice experiment for the self-employed and small business owners participating in the online consumer study. I will also analyze and display trends with existing data using ArcGIS. Additionally, I am an assistant on the Facebook project researching the limiting factors preventing small businesses to adopt contactless payments. By focusing on the aforementioned topics, this study will help gain a better understanding of how COVID-19 has affected small businesses.

I created a Discrete Choice Experiment to understand the behavior of small business owners regarding the impact of COVID-19. This experimental design is set to provide two different scenarios to see the preferences of small business owners. The attributes pertain to the effect of the pandemic on small business to see what owners would decide if given an opportunity to reinvent their current business. This contains attributes about payments and business operations to understand which aspects of a small business are most impacted by the pandemic.

Aditi Routh

Aditi Routh

I am Aditi Routh, a 3rd year Ph.D. student in Consumer Economics at the University of Georgia. I am currently research assistant on the Facebook small business project. My research interests include a data-driven approach to evaluate the adoption and use of payment instruments, especially by the financially underserved sections of the society, a Behavioral Economics approach to understanding the existing links between different payment instruments and consumers’ financial behavior (spending habit, attitude towards uncertainty). My previous research work includes studying prepaid debit card use by the unbanked population in relation to their future banking intentions, the effect of consumer’s locus of control on their mobile payment use. In the summer of 2020, I worked with the Financial Health Network, a nonprofit consultancy specializing in serving the financially underserved population.

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Keane Swenson

Keane Swenson

My name is Keane Swenson. I am in the MS in Business Analytics Program at the University of Georgia, with a BBA in Economics. I am part of the team funded by Facebook to analyze payment solutions for small businesses in Georgia in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. My duties currently revolve around administering a scoping survey to gather data to develop a baseline questionnaire and intervention where we will prime business owners to impact their integration of contactless payment systems. I also aid with a discrete choice design for the consumer payment study and data analyses.

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