Pages: (1-25 )
Abstract
Despite the rapid adoption of digital banking innovations in Nigeria to promote financial inclusion and increase access to financial services, there is a lack of empirical evidence on how these innovations drive the asset growth of deposit money banks. This study examined the impact of technology-based financial inclusion channels on bank performance from 2009 to 2024, utilising the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model. The findings showed that ATM and POS transactions had a strong positive impact on bank performance. MobilePay had a delayed but positive effect, while WebPay had no effect, implying low adoption or effectiveness. The Granger causality results also showed that ATM and POS are strong predictors of bank performance. The study concluded that electronic channels of financial access, that is, POS and ATM, played a critical role in improving the performance of Nigerian banks. Thus, it is recommended that banks invest heavily in POS and ATM infrastructure, whose steady and substantial contributions to performance in both the short and long term are evident.
Keywords: Financial Inclusion, Bank Performance, ARDL, ATM, POS, MobilePay, WebPay,