The Impact of Online Banking Services on Customer Spending Behavior

This paper is aimed on examining and testing the effect of mobile banking services on customer spending behavior and the changes caused by this influence of the COVID-19 pandemic in The Kingdom of Bahrain. In this study, the online banking services is the independent variable, where customer spending behavior is the dependent variable, COVID-19 pandemic is the moderator variable of the study. The study is focused on examining and testing the impact of the online banking services toward the consumer spending and saving behavior on making decision either to buy or save. The data will be collected in a primary form where the questionnaire survey method will be adopted to gather responses from bank consumers in the Kingdom of Bahrain and will be analyzed through the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences software (SPSS) tool by using the built-in functions such as regression, mediation, scale, correlation, coefficient, significant, and moderation analysis. The results of the study will show the acceptance and rejection of the hypotheses of the study. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Assessing the informational content of card transactions for nowcasting retail trade: Evidence for Latvia

We use a novel card transaction data maintained at the Central Bank of Latvia to assess their informational content for nowcasting retail trade in Latvia. During the COVID-19 pandemic in Latvia, the retail trade turnover dynamics underwent drastic changes reflecting the various virus containment measures introduced during three separate waves of the pandemic. We show that the nowcasting model augmented with card transaction data successfully captures the turbulence in retail trade turnover induced by the COVID-19 pandemic. The model with card transaction data outperforms all benchmark models in the out-of-sample nowcasting exercise and yields a notable improvement in forecasting metrics. We conduct our nowcasting exercise in forecast-as-you-go manner or in real-time squared;that is, we use real-time data vintages, and we make our nowcasts in real time as soon as card transaction data become available for the target month. © 2023 The Authors. Journal of Forecasting published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Effects of stimulus checks on spending patterns of different economic groups

This paper uses daily anonymous aggregated trans-action data to analyze the changes in consumer spending caused by receipt of the stimulus payments in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic. The stimulus checks were provided as part of the CARES Act aiming to provide emergency assistance for individuals and businesses affected by the pandemic. We analyze the impact of the receipt of those payments on the aggregated daily spending of different socio-economic groups and industries. We show that the transaction patterns of low spending consumers were most impacted by the stimulus payments among different spending groups. Our study results also indicate that the consumer responses after the first stimulus check (April 2020) were substantial and significant on industries that sell daily essential items, whereas consumer responses after the third stimulus check (March 2021) were significant in non-essential goods (e.g. luxury and entertainment sector). The results of this study are of crucial importance because they could help policy makers better shape stimulus payments that may be needed in future emergencies. © 2021 IEEE.