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Financial inclusion is rising—but are we converting access into impact?
Global Findex 2025 reports 75% of adults in low- and middle-income countries now have an account (79% globally), powered by the wave of digital as mobile phones and the internet transform access and usage. Yet 1.3 billion adults remain unbanked, 300 million accounts sit idle, and large gender gaps persist across regions. Credit, insurance, and pensions lag, and nearly half of adults in emerging markets still struggle to raise emergency funds.
Join top voices in the financial inclusion space to unpack the latest Findex findings and map the path forward toward development outcomes.
This is Season 3, Episode 1 of CGAP's podcast, Inclusive Finance Frontiers.
Featured Voices
- Leora Klapper, Lead Economist at the World Bank and founder of the Global Findex database
- Michael Schlein, President and CEO of Accion
- Sophie Sirtaine, World Bank Group Director, for the Financial Services Sector and CEO of CGAP
- Long Nath, salon owner in Cambodia
Listen and subscribe for free on your favorite platform. If you have any feedback, connect with us at podcast@cgap.org.
Transcript
Leora Klapper: We went to Malawi to a really low-income village, where people were living in thatched huts with no electricity, no sanitation. And every person that we spoke to in this village had a used phone, which they had purchased in order to open a mobile money account in order to save. And I asked them, "Do you receive payments? Do you make payments?" And they kept replying, "No, I'm poor, but I used my phone to save my money." And one responder was telling us how he had kept his money in his hut and it had been lost when there was a flood, it was washed away.
Lamis Daoud: If we had to sum up the last decade of financial inclusion efforts in one word, “transformative” might be a good place to start. The World Bank’s Global Findex 2025 shows that three out of four adults in low- and middle-income countries now have a financial account — an 80% increase in just a decade. Yet the work on financial inclusion is far from complete. Around 1.3 billion adults still lack accounts, and another 300 million hold inactive ones.
Hello and welcome to this episode of Inclusive Finance Frontiers, a podcast by CGAP. I’m your host, Lamis Daoud.
The biggest catalyst for the significant progress in financial inclusion that emerged from Findex 2025 has been digital: mobile phones and the internet are transforming access and usage. Mobile money, reported by just 1% of adults in 2014, now reaches 15% of adults worldwide. In Sub-Saharan Africa, 40% of adults have access to mobile money, the highest level of all world regions. Formal saving, which is crucial for resilience, has also surged though it remains below 40% in low- and middle-income countries.
Today on Inclusive Finance Frontiers, we’re unpacking the latest Findex findings and asking: What’s next for financial inclusion? And how do we turn inclusion into impact?
To understand what’s happening globally, we spoke with the person closest to the data: Leora Klapper. She is Lead Economist at the World Bank and founder of the Global Findex database, the world's only source of comparable data across 140 countries on how people access and use financial services as well as how these services affect their financial health.
Let’s dive into some of the key findings.
Leora Klapper: I'll highlight five that really stand out for me. So, first, mobile-enabled financial services are now everywhere, not just in Sub-Saharan Africa. So, although people may think of the M-Pesa Kenya model today, so globally we find that 79% of adults have a financial account and more than half can use it digitally. That means they can make payments and money using a card or phone. It's not just about access to their accounts, it's also helping people save.
For example, we went to Malawi to a really low-income village, where people were living in thatched huts with no electricity, no sanitation. And every person that we spoke to in this village had a used phone, which they had purchased in order to open a mobile money account in order to save. And I asked them, "Do you receive payments? Do you make payments?" And they kept replying, "No, I'm poor, but I used my phone to save my money." And one responder was telling us how he had kept his money in his hut and it had been lost when there was a flood, it was washed away. So, in low- and middle-income countries, 40% of adults are saving formally in an account thanks to the convenience of making these small transactions using their phone.
Lamis Daoud: While using mobile phones to expand formal saving, especially where banking access is thin, is a welcome development, Leora points out that progress tends to outpace mobile security.
Leora Klapper: Second insight, I would say that despite all of that digital progress, basic security is still lagging. So only about 60% of mobile phone owners have a password on their phone, and it's surprisingly low, considering how much financial activity is now happening through their mobile devices. Third, we looked at barriers to digital access, which are also the barriers to digital financial access. Around 85% of adults in low- and middle-income countries have a phone, but poorer adults are about nine percentage points less likely than wealthier ones to own one. And the gap is especially large among smartphone ownership. The same gap exists between men and women but varies a lot by country.
And when we ask people why they don't have a phone, the overwhelming answer is simple. They just can't afford it. It's affordability of the handset, affordability of the minutes, of data. Fourth, digital payments have grown really quickly. 80% of account holders now use them to send or receive money and digital merchant payments, especially. It surged during the COVID health pandemic, when it became a necessity, for small businesses especially, to accept digital payments, but we've seen the trend continue.
And finally, two thirds of people who experience an extreme weather event, such as a flood, a drought, a cyclone, lost income assets or both. And that impact is even higher in the 10 most disaster-prone countries, mostly in Africa and in Asia. It shows how financial resilience and climate vulnerability are deeply connected.
Lamis Daoud: We spoke with Long Nath, who lives in Ondoung Khmer Village in Camboadia’s Kampote Province. She shared with us her journey with financial services. Long is a salon owner who also offers makeup services for events. She takes care of her mother, father, and daughter.
Long Nath: At first, my salon was small because I didn’t have as many products and equipment as I do now. So, I took a loan, and it turned out to be beneficial. I had enough money to buy materials for both use and sale, allowing me to earn a small profit. I also save a portion of my profit to prepare to repay the loan. I noticed that before taking the loan, I couldn’t earn as much as I do now.
Lamis Daoud: Beyond credit, Long told us that she currently uses other financial solutions, like a savings account.
Long Nath: I make deposits every month. It is good. Because they have introduced like insurance and introduced savings.
Lamis Daoud: Her ambition is to continue growing her business.
Long Nath: For my dream, I still want to open a salon shop. But to expand it into a larger [one]. If I rely only on my earnings, it’s not enough—it’s too little. If we want to expand bigger, we’ll need a significant amount of capital, so we must continue applying for loans.
Lamis Daoud: But not all women in low- and middle-income countries share Long’s experience. Findex 2025 may have revealed real progress in narrowing the gender gap, which for many years was stuck at an average of 9% then dropped to 6%, but the gender gap is now much more widespread across countries.
On the one hand, due to the introduction of new and improved financial products, counties like Cote d'Ivoire cut its gender gap in account ownership from 27 percentage points to just seven, and in Uzbekistan, the gap disappeared. But in other countries, stubborn gaps persist, reaching as high as 30%.
Leora Klapper: Some countries, Pakistan, for example, continue to show very large and persisting gender gaps. Not just in financial access, but also in mobile phone ownership, and the two being increasingly related. And in many extremely low-income countries, overall inclusion remains limited because people just don't see the need for an account or feel they don't have enough money to justify one. In some regions, like parts of Central America, high account fees add to that challenge. And as financial services move digitally, gaps in mobile phone ownership are becoming even more critical because without a phone, people are increasingly cut off from financial access altogether.
Lamis Daoud: So, what does the overall data mean for the future? For that, we turn to Michael Schlein, President and CEO of Accion, and Sophie Sirtaine, World Bank Group Director, for the Financial Services Sector and CEO of CGAP.
Michael Schlein: In 2011, 41% of adults had access to a financial account, and today that is now 75%. That's an 80% increase. That means more than a billion people gained access. That is remarkable progress that we should all celebrate.
Lamis Daoud: While both Michael and Sophie agree that, overall, Findex reveals a positive story about the significant strides financial inclusion has made in the last decade, they flagged a set of lingering concerns.
Michael Schlein:
The next billion is going to be much harder to reach than the last billion. We used to talk about three billion people being left out and excluded by the global financial system. Then it was two billion. Now we talk about 1.6. And specifically, we talk about 1.3 having no access and another 300 million having dormant counts, which is really no access at all. So, we focus on 1.6 billion people being left out and poorly served. And the next billion is going to be harder to reach because they are remote, rural, smallholder farmers, women, micro and small merchants. So, the pace is slowing.
Lamis Daoud: And there’s another issue gaining urgency every year, as highlighted by Sophie.
Sophie Sirtaine: Digital finance risks are growing in nature and scale, while at the same time digital and financial literacy remains low. For instance, Findex reveals that one in five digital finance users have faced scam attempts.
Lamis Daoud: And perhaps the most troubling insight is that financial resilience hasn’t improved at a time when extreme events are striking with growing speed and force.
Sophie Sirtaine: Despite progress in account ownership, resilience has not improved as access to emergency funds remains challenging for nearly half of adults in emerging markets… one in three adults worry about meeting monthly expenses and one in four worry about medical cost.
Michael Schlein: Half of the people living in emerging markets say that they cannot cover their expenses for a single month in a time of an emergency. That is very troubling. We have not made progress on that for years. That's frankly true in the developed world as well, but it is something, as a world, we need to do better on.
Lamis Daoud: Despite huge gains in financial access, Findex 2025 also reveals that the lived experience of financial stress remains unchanged for millions. But even with that, Michael sees enormous potential, driven by digital innovation.
Michael Schlein: Today, we are living an incredible moment in human history. For several decades, all of us in this line of work have worked to reduce global poverty, and we've made enormous success. Hundreds of millions of people over the last few decades have successfully emerged from poverty until today. That progress has now ground to a halt, and as a world, we are no longer making progress helping people escape from poverty. Now, at the same time, we have incredibly new digital tools at our access, and the innovation is extraordinary. And so I put those two things together and say, "We need to use those digital tools in order to redouble our efforts to make progress around poverty." It used to be the transaction sizes were too small to be commercially viable. Today, there's no such thing.
It used to be very difficult to know your client remotely, but today with data and data analytics, we can really know our clients, and know her needs, and meet them responsibly from great distances. So, we've got this new world of digital tools that are allowing us to reach people we've never been able to reach and see people we've never been able to see before. And that is the innovation that we need to harness to reach those 1.6 billion people who continue to be left out and poorly served by the global financial system.
Lamis Daoud: Let’s recap:
First: The next frontier of inclusion is harder — reaching the next billion of financially excluded people will require new models, not business as usual.
Second: Digital access has expanded massively, but digital security and affordability are lagging behind.
Third: Access alone isn’t automatically translating into resilience.
Sophie shares with us where we can go from here.
Sophie Sirtaine: Making sure that financial inclusion translates into better outcomes for individuals, including higher resilience and better progress towards prosperity and global development goals remains a priority. And for that, I think we must do four key things. The first is to close remaining gaps in financial inclusion, 1.3 billion people are still excluded. And that in turn will require closing connectivity gaps through wider affordable phone ownership and internet access, especially among poor individuals and for women.
It will also require working towards payment digitization, because we know that a third of adults in developing economies in fact opened their first accounts specifically to receive a wage or a government payment. And that, in turn, is a ramp onto using digital payments and even saving. And lastly, we will need to address gender norms that continue to limit women's financial inclusion in many countries.
The second thing we will need to do is to expand access to more financial services than just an account. Indeed, while we see from Findex that we are starting to make progress on savings, we still need to build on this and develop more higher-value financial services, such as credit, insurance, and pensions that are all equally vital tools for individuals and communities to build resilience.
Thirdly, we really need to champion entrepreneurship and job creation by supporting finance for nano and micro businesses. We know from Findex that of the 15% of self-employed adults who borrowed for business, most in fact relied on informal sources. And we know also that women generally find it more difficult to secure credit. Yet credit enables small business owners to grow their venture and its resilience and therefore to create and preserve jobs. So, that's also a key priority.
And last but not least, we must strengthen financial consumer protection.
Lamis Daoud: So, what’s next for financial inclusion? The Findex gives us a story of big gains but also big gaps… a story of digital promise and digital risk… and a story of growing account access, but resilience standing still.
The next decade won’t just be about getting people into the financial system. It will be about making sure that financial services deliver real life improvements for low-income communities, such as resilience to shocks, greater women's economic empowerment, and job creation.
That’s the end of our podcast today. Thank you so much to everyone we interviewed: Leora, Michael, and Sophie.
And of course, thank YOU for joining us for this episode of Inclusive Finance Frontiers, a podcast by CGAP. I’m your host, Lamis Daoud.
For more information on our work in inclusive finance and other topics, please visit our website at cgap.org.
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