Dynamic linkages between mobile money and banks' performance in Nigeria : an Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach

This study investigated the relationship between mobile money and Nigerian banks with the purpose of ascertaining if forward and backward causal linkages exist and the direction of causation between the two variables. This inquiry was motivated by the inherent challenges of a low level of awareness, enrolment and utilization of mobile money services in Nigeria despite the efforts of the government to replicate East Africa's success story in Nigeria. This study employed econometric techniques such as the modern autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model and Wald causality to respectively assess the relationship between the explained and explanatory variables and the direction of causality between mobile money and various banks' performance metrics using quarterly time series data between 2014 and 2018. The empirical results revealed that there is a causal relationship between mobile money and banks' performance indicators, such as profit before tax and total assets. On the premises of the empirical findings, the study concludes that mobile money has forward and backward linkages with banks. performance in Nigeria. This implies that Nigeria's mobile money market as presently constituted does provide attractive incentives for banks to leverage on in their quest to improve performance.