Progress Toward Financial Inclusion

Progress

The global community made substantial progress toward financial inclusion in the past decade.

2017 Findex data shows 69% of adults now hold transaction accounts—a significant improvement. However challenges to meaningful inclusion remain.

Persistent Problems

Transaction Accounts

• Despite marked gains in the provision of accounts, 1.7 billion adults still lack access to a basic transaction account.
• Exclusion is higher than average among women and rural communities and in poorer countries (Findex).

Meaningful Use and Scale

• Transaction accounts opened by the previously excluded still suffer from problems of dormancy and in frequent use.
• 25% of account holders in developing economies have fully dormant accounts, not having used their account for a single transition in the past year (Findex).

Next Section: Section 2: The Imperative of Scale