*Insights from the Global Findex Database
...accelerated by mobile phones and the internet, but gains have been uneven across countries. A new World Bank report on the use of financial services also finds that men remain more likely than women to have an account.
Globally, 69 percent of adults – 3.8 billion people – now have an account at a bank or mobile money provider, a crucial step in escaping poverty. This is up from 62 percent in 2014 and just 51 percent in 2011. From 2014 to 2017, 515 million adults obtained an account, and 1.2 billion have done so since 2011, according to the Global Findex database. While in some economies account ownership has surged, progress has been slower elsewhere, often held back by large disparities between men and women and between the rich and poor. The gap between men and women in developing economies remains unchanged since 2011, at 9 percentage points.
In Sub-Saharan Africa, mobile money drove financial inclusion. While the share of adults with a financial institution account remained flat, the share with a mobile money account almost doubled, to 21 percent. Since 2014, mobile money accounts have spread from East Africa to West Africa and beyond. In high-income economies, almost all adults own an account — meaning the unbanked population can overwhelmingly be found in the developing world. According to Efina reports December 2018, 36.8% of Nigerian adults are still financial excluded.
Identification, infrastructure (Internet), last mile solutions and high costs are still challenges plaguing the market.
And the cash-out challenges can only be solved by providing solutions that work offline at low costs that meets the under served and unbanked.
