Purpose.

This paper aims to determine causal relationships between the level of productive credit, real deposits and money demand - all of them in real terms - and Gross National Product between 2006 and 2020.

Design/methodology/approach.

The vector autoregressive technique (VAR) was used, where data from real macroeconomic aggregates published by the Central Bank of Ecuador (BCE) are correlated, such as productive credit, gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, deposits and money demand.

Findings.

The results indicate that there is no causal relationship, in the Granger sense, between GDP and financial activity, but there is between the growth rate of real money demand per capita and the growth rate of total real deposits per capita.

Originality/value.

The study shows that bank credit mainly finances the operations of current assets and/or liabilities. In addition, economic agents use the banking system mainly to carry out transactional and precautionary activities