Pakistan, Oct. 10 -- When people talk about protecting digital payment users, the conversation usually turns to technology: stronger encryption, biometric authentication, artificial intelligence and better fraud-detection systems.

Those tools matter. But research on mobile-money users across 35 economies suggests that another factor deserves equal attention: the quality of the institutions that oversee the digital financial system. The study matched information from 16,387 mobile-money account owners with governance indicators measuring regulatory quality and government effectiveness. It found that stronger governance was associated with lower exposure to attempts by unknown persons to obtain users' PINs or passwords. The finding becomes...