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More adults than ever in low- and middle-income countries have access to a bank or other financial accounts thanks to the ongoing spread of mobile banking services, even as women’s access remains lower than that of men.
The World Bank’s Global Findex 2025 report found that the global account ownership rate stood at 79 per cent in 2024, compared with 51 per cent in 2011 and 74 per cent in 2021.
In prepared remarks World Bank president Ajay Banga said that financial inclusion has the potential to improve lives and transform entire economies.
“We’re modernising payment systems and helping to remove regulatory roadblocks — so that people and businesses have the financing they need to innovate and create jobs,” he added.
Certain regions have seen notable upticks in mobile banking; in Sub-Saharan Africa 40 per cent of adults had a mobile money account in 2024, up from 27 per cent in 2021.
In Latin America and the Caribbean, the number of adults with a mobile money account rose from 22 per cent to 37 per cent over the same period.
When broken down by country, account ownership increased by more than 50 percentage points in Armenia, Uganda and Zambia between 2011 and 2024.
In Ghana and India, account ownership similarly grew by more than 50 percentage points between 2011 and 2024, reaching 81 per cent in the former and 89 per cent in the latter.
While mobile money has been the key driver of increases in financial account ownership over the period from 2014 to 2024, such rises are far from uniform in low- and middle-income countries, which contain the greatest concentration of adults without accounts.
And 53 per cent of those without accounts — more than 650mn adults — reside in just eight countries: Bangladesh, China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, and Pakistan.
Improving access to mobile banking in developing nations remains vital as it increases people’s ability to save money, according to the World Bank.
In 2024, 40 per cent of adults in developing economies saved in a financial account in 2024 — a 16 percentage point increase since 2021 and the fastest rise in more than a decade.
In sub-Saharan Africa, formal savings increased by 12 percentage points to 35 per cent of adults over the same period.
Mobile banking was pioneered in sub-Saharan Africa in the early 2000s with the launch of M-Pesa in Kenya, with similar mobile money services spreading throughout much of the continent in the past 20 years.
The World Bank notes that increasing the use of smartphones is also important for increasing access to economic opportunities and more robust financial services around the world.
However the ownership of smartphones by region is unevenly distributed.
The World Bank also concludes that one of the remaining challenges to even higher levels of mobile phone banking use is to reach the remaining adults without accounts: primarily women and those in poverty.
While account access for women in low- and middle-income economies has grown from 50 per cent in 2014 to 73 per cent in 2021, 77 per cent of women globally have accounts, compared with 81 per cent of men.
The east Asia and Pacific region continues to stand out with no statistically significant difference between the share of women who have an account and the share of men who do. Similarly, women and men in India are now equally likely to have accounts.
Yet the World Bank regions notes that sub-Saharan Africa, and the Middle East and north Africa, reported respective gender gaps of 12 and 15 percentage points in terms of financial access, more than twice the average for low- and middle-income economies as a whole.
Latin America and the Caribbean, and Europe and central Asia each have gender gaps of 8 percentage points.
The reasons for those in poverty being unable to access financial services differs from region to region. In south Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, the majority of people (69 and 77 per cent, respectively) said their main problem is that they cannot afford a mobile phone.
A lack of reliable mobile network coverage also affects mobile phone ownership in some economies. In Chad, for instance, 54 per cent of adults cite lack of network coverage as the key reason as to why they do not own a mobile phone.
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