Incorporating Trip-Chaining to Measuring Canadians’ Access to Cash

Household mobility data can improve our measurement of access to cash. The existing literature typically assumes that households visit their nearest ABMs or financial institution branches from their homes, without combining cash withdrawals with other activities (i.e., on their way to shopping). However, the typical approach neglects two realistic features: The first is that, due to spatial agglomeration, cash access points could be co-located with popular points of interest, such as retail service centers; and, second, households could combine multiple trips, via trip-chaining, to reduce travel costs. Our paper employs smartphone data to construct an improved cash access metric by accounting for both spatial agglomeration and households’ travel patterns. We find that incorporating trip-chaining into the travel metric could show that travel costs are from 15% to 25% less than not incorporating trip-chaining and that the biggest decrease is driven by rural residents.