Analyzing Survey Data from Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua

This piece shares findings on the extent of digital adoption in Central America for regular payment practices. Overall, we find that consumers continue to prefer making payments in person, and those who use mobile financial services tend to do so infrequently. We also share a number of factors that, at the individual level, are associated with higher rates of digital usership.

Financial Inclusion and Digital Financial Vehicles

Central American adults have less access to financial services than their counterparts elsewhere in Latin America, with fewer than 45 percent owning a bank account. Constrained financial access and inclusion is a significant challenge to regional economic development, and one that the Inter-American Dialogue has been working to address through targeted financial advising.  

This strategy has promoted financial education and savings formalization among vulnerable communities with low rates of access to formal financial services. For example, about 20 percent of women receiving advice formalized their savings, in turn improving their asset-building opportunities and furthering economic independence. Many of them also learned to stretch their disposable income over time. 

Through our work we observe that digital financial platforms have become an increasingly important part of inclusion efforts. The Dialogue has helped remittance recipients to leverage digital instruments for increased savings or disposable income and ease of transactions, as well as encouraging clients to adopt mobile payment technologies that allow for better management of disposable income. 

Digital tools have a key role to play in improving economic well-being, especially among vulnerable populations with low rates of participation in traditional (analog) financial services. As digital financial platforms and companies expand their offerings, it is important to understand the scope and depth of the average consumer’s use of these platforms.  

Key Findings

The analysis presented here, based on survey data from late 2024, offers insight into financial practices and user behavior. The survey focused specifically on the use of digital financial vehicles, or instruments that rely on internet-based platforms or mobile services, such as mobile banking or mobile payments applications.  

While Central Americans regularly perform many different kinds of payments, at a minimum, most pay for basic services such as water, cable, gas and electricity, as well as food products.   

Characteristics of Payers

Central Americans continue to rely on in-person rather than online payment methods, reflecting, to some extent, the business models in each country. Overall, there is limited reliance on mobile applications to make regular payments; as of 2024, their use was infrequent. Among survey respondents, only 33 percent of those who used digital financial platforms made frequent payments through those platforms (see Figure 1).  

The digital user profile offers important insights into client demographics: for example, more women than men use digital applications, even though women have lower rates of bank account ownership. Among survey respondents, “digital users” were mostly female; 65.65 percent identified as such. This figure contrasts with bank account ownership, which is higher among men. Moreover, most digital users surveyed were employed in the informal economy.   

Additionally, the percentage of people receiving remittances who use a digital platform to make payments is slightly higher than that of other groups surveyed, at almost 10 percent.   

Other noticeable characteristics of those who use digital financial applications to make payments include living in larger urban areas, saving money, working in the informal sector, and having a lower intention to migrate compared with those who do not use digital financial applications.

METHODOLOGY

Surveys were conducted with 500 respondents in each of four Central American countries: Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua. They were geographically distributed, according to the distribution of the origin of migration. Surveys were conducted over the phone, with a rejection rate of 25 percent.