Soft Commitment Remittance Labeling
RCTClinical Trial
High consumer demand for innovative financial products often fails to translate into completed real-world financial transactions due to institutional operational bottlenecks at target institutions.
Picture this
Imagine ordering a textbook online with eager interest, but the local delivery post office lacks a computer system or takes three weeks to process paper receipts. Because the student needs the textbook for class next Monday, you cancel the order and hand cash to the student directly to avoid missing the deadline.
What the evidence says
While 27.1% of migrants signed intent forms, operational delays—such as schools lacking bank accounts or taking 2–3 weeks to produce invoices—resulted in only 21 actual transactions being completed (a 4.3% final execution rate among eligible participants).
- Who was studied
- N = 483 eligible Filipino migrants in Rome evaluated for EduPay execution; 131 signed initial authorization letters (27.1% take-up rate).
- How
- Field execution tracking of the EduPay product rollout involving logistics coordination between Bank of the Philippine Islands (BPI), PAPSCU, and local schools in the Philippines.
What to do
Streamline institutional onboarding and lower transaction processing latency before introducing specialized financial delivery channels to prevent consumer drop-off.
From the source
"In practice during the pilot phase, many of the schools did not provide the needed information in a timely fashion, so that the majority of these intended transactions were not executed."
Directing remittances to education with soft and hard commitments: Evidence from a lab-in-the-field experiment and new product take-up among Filipino migrants in Rome