Report Methodology

Financial Access 2010 is the second in an annual series presenting indicators on access to savings, credit, and payment services in banks and regulated nonbank financial institutions. The report updates data on access to financial services from a survey of financial regulators in 142 economies and includes new chapters on financial inclusion mandates and reforms, consumer protection policies and SME finance.

Survey design 
Data were collected through a survey sent to the main financial supervisors, such as central banks or bank supervisory agencies. The survey questionnaire consists of two parts: the statistical table and policy questions.
 
Statistical table. Similar to the 2009 survey, the 2010 questionnaire collects data on the numbers and volumes of deposit accounts and loans, number of bank branches, automated teller machines, and point-of-service terminals, as well as other measures of the use of financial services by banks and formal regulated nonbank financial institutions. A formal financial institution is a registered business whose primary activity is providing financial services. Formal financial institutions can be regulated or nonregulated. A financial institution is considered regulated if it is subject to regulation and/or supervision by any of the state regulators. The regulatory requirements that apply to such institutions could be prudential or nonprudential. The data were collected for commercial banks and for regulated nonbank financial institutions, adding value to other studies that have preceded it. To make the cross-country comparison of the services provided by the different types of financial institutions possible, the respondents were asked to classify types of regulated institutions into four broad categories:
 
Commercial banks: Banks with a full banking license. In some countries, the term “universal banks” or other terms may be used. Majority government-/state-owned banks should be included in this category to the extent that they perform a broad set of retail banking functions and are regulated and supervised in the same manner as privately owned banks.
Cooperatives, credit unions, and mutuals: Financial institutions that are owned and controlled by their members (customers), regardless of whether they do business exclusively with their members or with members and nonmembers.

Specialized state financial institutions: Specialized state-owned institutions are extensions of the government whose main purpose is to lend support to economic development and/or to provide savings, payment, and deposit services to the public. They include postal banks, government savings banks, SME lending facilities, agriculture banks, and development banks.

Microfinance institutions: Institutions whose primary business model is to lend to (and possibly take deposits from) the poor, often using specialized methodologies such as group lending.
 
The data collected using this institutional classification necessarily understate the scale of microfinance because many banks, cooperatives, and specialized state-owned institutions provide microfinance services as part of their activities.
 
Policy questions. The second part of the survey contains questions on regulations relating to the provision of financial services, including financial inclusion mandates, consumer protection, and measurement of SME finance.

Survey sample 
Questionnaires were sent to 151 countries: 13 in East Asia and Pacific, 27 in Europe and Central Asia, 20 in Latin America and the Caribbean, 14 in the Middle East and North Africa, 6 in South Asia, 40 in Sub-Saharan Africa, and 23 in the high-income OECD countries. For practical purposes, most small islands and economies at war were not included. The sample covers more than 94 percent of the world’s population and nearly 98 percent of global GDP.
 
The questionnaires were sent directly to the governors’ offices of central banks. When appropriate, they were also sent to monetary authorities or banking supervisory agencies. Depending on the country and the structure of the regulatory authority, the questionnaires were filled out by one or several of the following departments: research, statistics, supervision, and foreign relations. Of the 151 questionnaires sent, 142 economies responded, for a response rate of 94 percent.
 
The data passed several robustness checks. First, the numbers and values of deposit and loan accounts for banks and other regulated financial institutions were compared with those from the 2009 survey. Where discrepancies exceeded 20 percent from the previous year, extensive follow-up was conducted to verify the numbers or to explain the data differences. Values were also cross-checked with GDP, population, private credit, and deposit statistics available in World Development Indicators and International Financial Statistics databases.
 
Multiple checks for internal consistency and rationality were also conducted. When anomalies were found, the respondents were asked to provide clarifications. In the absence of adequate clarity, the data points were dropped (in only a few cases). 

To improve cross-country data comparability, definitions have been slightly modified from Financial Access 2009.