Blog

Beyond Borders: Expanding Financial Inclusion Through e-Commerce

Cross-border e-commerce enables women to expand their markets, reach new clients, and trade in greater volumes, while doing business remotely, saving time and improving efficiency. These transactions create a financial footprint that can help women qualify for loans, insurance, and other financial products.

The Power of Microdata From Global Findex

In this blog, CGAP goes beyond the aggregate data in Global Findex and uses its microdata to examine financial inclusion at the individual level. Here’s how we are doing it and why.

Beyond Account Access: Converting Financial Inclusion into Resilience

Account ownership in LMICs has nearly doubled since 2011, but financial resilience remains stubbornly low: just 56% of adults can access emergency funds within 30 days. Achieving true progress on financial resilience will mean moving beyond account ownership as the primary metric of success.

Six Ways Open Finance Can Drive Competition and Inclusion

Open finance can make financial markets more inclusive and competitive, but only if designed intentionally. CGAP highlights six policy levers to ensure it benefits low-income and underserved people.

How Has Regulating Digital Lending Enhanced Women’s Credit in Indonesia?

Intentionally embedding gender considerations into Indonesia’s peer-to-peer (P2P) and other fintech regulations and guidance could unlock new finance pathways for women entrepreneurs to access the finance they need to grow and thrive.

Women Bear the Cost of Underutilizing FATF’s Risk-Based Approach

The recently revised FATF Standards create new opportunities to apply proportionate AML/CFT measures that recognize women’s generally lower risk, helping close the gender gap in financial inclusion if policymakers act intentionally.

Findex 2025: Why Financial Inclusion Needs to be More Responsible

We unpack the biggest challenges that digital financial services pose to consumer safety, and recommend what providers, financial authorities and other actors can do to ensure that digital financial inclusion remains safe, fair, and trusted.

New Data Show the Key Role of Inclusive Finance in Climate Adaptation

Our latest Findex blog takes a deep dive into Findex 2025 data at the intersection of climate shocks, resilience, and financial services, and underscores the vital importance of generating bottom-up data on climate adaptation.

From Access to Agency: The Next Chapter in Women’s Financial Inclusion

Despite global progress, meaningful gender gaps in account ownership still persist in 65 economies. Our latest Findex blog unpacks new data on women’s financial inclusion and identifies the opportunities ahead.

Measuring Financial Health: Findex Broadens Its Scope

Financial health is rising on global agendas, but measuring it remains fragmented. The 2025 Global Findex expands coverage across four key dimensions, offering a step toward global benchmarks while balancing local realities.

Building Resilience: Women, Solar Energy & India’s Turmeric Economy

Women do 80% of the labor in India’s turmeric value chain, much of it grueling and manual. Solar dryers and peelers could ease this burden, improve quality, raise incomes, and build climate resilience with support from green finance tools.

Breaking the Cash Habit: The Urgent Need to Accelerate Digital Merchant Payments

In the latest blog in our Findex series, we look at the importance of accelerating digital merchant payments and what is needed to move Sub-Saharan Africa from potential to momentum.

What the New FATF Travel Rule Means for Financial Inclusion

While new FATF updates aim to combat money laundering, financing of terrorism, and fraud, they also raise important questions about how implementation will affect financial inclusion. We offer analysis on Recommendation 16 (or the 'Travel Rule').

From Access to Impact: It’s Time to Realize the Full Promise of Financial Inclusion

Part of CGAP’s new series on the World Bank’s Global Findex 2025, we draw from CGAP's and Accion's work to highlight six opportunities that need to be prioritized to unlock a golden opportunity for embracing growing digitization to shift financial inclusion from access to impact.

Banking on Progress: Why the Next Chapter of Financial Inclusion is so Important

New data from the World Bank’s Global Findex 2025 reveals significant progress on financial inclusion. But while much has been achieved, challenges remain and new solutions are needed to help reach the last mile and to unlock the power of financial services for development.

The FATF’s Revised Travel Rule: Key Changes for Payment Transparency

The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) recently adopted a revised travel rule for payments and value transfers – known as Recommendation 16 (R.16). The adoption of the rule raises some important questions – why was this revision required and what is the scope of the changes?

Digital Payments Are Changing Women Entrepreneurs’ Lives—What’s Next?

CGAP’s Impact Pathfinder shows that uptake and use of digital payments can benefit women-owned micro and small enterprises by reducing barriers to entrepreneurship, enabling business growth, and promoting financial security.

Rethinking Impact Measurement and Management: Fit for Outcomes

Too often, impact measurement focuses on what’s easiest to track, rather than what’s most useful for decision-making. We challenge conventional approaches to impact measurement and management (IMM), offering a practical way forward: use cases that align IMM strategies with investment context, purpose, and outcomes goals.

Celebrating 30 Years of Collaborative Impact

CGAP is 30. We reflect on the progress made in advancing the lives of people living in poverty through financial inclusion over the past 30 years, and what comes next.

Tailored and Systemic: Navigating Climate Risks With Market-Aligned Responses

Climate risks pose challenges for vulnerable communities, FSPs, and their supporters. Understanding these risks—and how public and private actors can respond—is key to advancing climate adaptation and building resilience.