Financial Inclusion
Financial inclusion means individuals and businesses having access to useful, affordable financial services, such as accounts, payments, savings, credit and insurance, delivered responsibly. The first step is usually an account that can send and receive money.
Also called: access to finance · access to financial services · banking the unbanked · financial access
The World Bank measures it through the Global Findex survey. The 2025 edition, based on interviews during 2024 with about 148,000 adults in 141 economies, found that 79 percent of adults worldwide had an account at a financial institution or a mobile money provider, up from about half in 2011. That still left around 1.3 billion adults without one, most of them in developing economies and disproportionately women.
Much of the progress since 2011 has come from phones rather than bank branches. Mobile money accounts let people store value, pay and receive remittances without a bank account, and in parts of sub-Saharan Africa they are the main form of account. Government payments, wages paid into accounts and cheap domestic transfer systems such as instant payment schemes have also pulled people in.
Access and use are different. Many accounts are opened for one payment and then left dormant, and an account without savings, credit or insurance does little to protect a household against shocks. Inclusion policy has therefore moved from counting accounts to asking whether people use them and whether products are fair.
For payments businesses, inclusion has a compliance side. Simplified due diligence for low-value accounts, accepted by the FATF under a risk-based approach, is what makes it possible to open an account for someone without a passport or utility bill. Over-strict de-risking works in the other direction and pushes people back into cash and the informal economy.
In practice
Findex figures are survey estimates and are updated every few years; quote them with their year. Account ownership includes mobile money accounts, which may not offer savings or credit.
Learn more on Money Wiki
This page gives the short answer. Money Wiki has a longer guide to Financial Inclusion, with more detail and background.
Read “Financial Inclusion” on Money Wiki (opens in a new tab)
See also
- Mobile MoneyMobile money is a stored-value account held on a mobile phone and run by a mobile network operator or other provider, letting users deposit cash, send and receive money and pay bills without needing a bank account.
- Informal EconomyThe informal economy is the economic activity of workers and businesses that are not covered, or not adequately covered, by formal arrangements such as registration, tax, labour law and social protection. Most of it is legal work done outside those systems.
- Know Your CustomerKnow Your Customer, or KYC, is the process of identifying and verifying a customer before a business relationship starts and keeping that understanding current while it lasts, so a firm knows who it is actually dealing with. Identity verification is the first step of KYC, not the whole of it.
- De-riskingDe-risking is a bank exiting a whole category of customer, such as money services businesses, crypto firms or particular corridors, rather than assessing and pricing each relationship on its own facts. Accounts close because of what the customer is, not what the customer did.
- Risk-Based ApproachA risk-based approach means identifying where the money-laundering and terrorist-financing risk actually sits and applying stronger controls there and lighter ones elsewhere. It is the organising principle of the FATF standards, and it is not a licence to do less.
- RemittanceA remittance is a cross-border transfer sent by one individual to another — typically a migrant worker sending money home to family. It is distinct from a commercial payment between businesses, and regulators define it more narrowly than everyday speech does.