The Transition Benefit: Social Marketing Company’s Experience with Digital Financial Services

This report is based on an evaluation of the impact of SMC’s pilot transition to digital financial services (DFS) under a grant provided by FHI 360 through the USAID mSTAR project. The evaluation used a pseudo-random sample of respondents across SMC’s different beneficiary groups, and included an instrumental mix of qualitative and quantitative methods of inquiry.

During the ten-month pilot period, SMC and its staff made a total of BDT 95,179,014 (approximately USD $1.2 million) in transactions using DFS, including both mobile and other electronic channels. Of that total, slightly more than three-quarters were for sales collections, while the remainder were for training payments.

Overall, the evaluation found that the transition to DFS resulted in increased efficiencies for administrative tasks by considerably lowering time spent when compared against the baseline data collected at the start of this pilot.

Note: Some errors were found in the initially published version of this report. Those have been corrected as of July 2016.