Financial Inclusion is one of the biggest themes underpinning the transformation of the global financial services landscape. Although the use of emerging technologies in the banking finds the most lucrative use cases in CX and process efficiency, its true power lies in the capability to elevate the infrastructural norms with a cognitive, data-driven approach, to extend the basic financial services to the unbanked population around the world.
The World Bank’s Findex report suggests that there were more than 1.8 billion people globally in 2017 without access to an account with a traditional FI. While this represents a whopping 32.9% of the global adult population, this indeed is a massive improvement from the 49.4% of unbanked population levels in 2011. The decrease of 16.5% substantiates the impact of an ecosystem-wide collaborative effort between governments, regulators, banks, and FinTech innovators. These six years have seen a systemic shift in the approach of the entire FinServ ecosystem in using technology and innovation in policy-making to bring unbanked people into the formal banking system.
While government and regulatory push has had the most impact on financial inclusion, the modern FinTech business models, emergence of blockchain/AI/other technologies, cross-industry collaboration for innovative use cases such as mobile money, harnessing the abundant data pools with cutting-edge analytics and cognitive capabilities, etc. are the key drivers of this push for financial inclusion.
In terms of regions, South Asia has led the financial inclusion race in the past six years. In 2017, 31.6% of people in South Asia were unbanked, which is an astonishing improvement as compared to 67.6% of unbanked population levels in 2011. India tops the charts in this region with a 3X decrease in the share of the unbanked population, which decreased by 44%
