Financial Inclusion Isn't Just About Access. It's About What Comes Next

We talk a lot about financial inclusion. The statistics sound encouraging: 76% of the world's population now has access to a financial account. Mobile money has exploded from 1% adoption in 2014 to 15% today. Digital payments are growing rapidly, especially in low- and middle-income countries.

But here's the uncomfortable question: are we measuring the right thing?

Financial Inclusion Isn't Just About Access. It's About What Comes Next

Having an account is just the starting point. What matters is whether people can actually use that account to improve their lives. Whether they can save safely. Access credit when they need it. Send money to family without losing 20% in fees. Build financial resilience.

And that's where the gap still exists. Because while we've made real progress on breadth by getting more people connected to the financial system, we've made much less progress on depth and utility. Only 31% of adults globally report having saved formally. Only 29% have borrowed from a financial institution. And for the 1.3 billion people who still don't have accounts at all? The barriers aren't just about infrastructure anymore.

What's Actually Holding People Back

The obstacles to financial inclusion are structural, not just technical.

Cost. Cross-border remittances cost an average of 6.49% globally as of Q1 2025, with Sub-Saharan Africa remaining the most expensive region at 8.78%. Banks remain the most expensive service providers, charging an average of 14.55%. For migrant workers sending money home, that's not a service fee, it's a tax on being poor.

Documentation. Traditional KYC requirements assume people have formal identification, proof of address, employment records. In Sub-Saharan Africa, lack of documentation is cited as one of the most significant barriers by adults without accounts. In the Philippines, 45% of adults without bank accounts cite lack of documentation as a reason, even though some form of ID is required for opening accounts.

Trust. In many communities, especially those that have been historically excluded or exploited by formal financial systems, trust is the biggest barrier. And it's not irrational mistrust, it's based on lived experience. CGAP research found that 13% of Global Findex survey respondents who don't have an account identify lack of trust as a reason.

Fragmentation. Even when digital payment systems exist, they often don't talk to each other. You can't easily move money between a mobile wallet and a bank account. Between one country's system and another's. Between different currencies or ledgers.

And perhaps most importantly: the services available don't match people's actual needs. A savings account that requires minimum balances doesn't help someone whose income is irregular. Credit scoring based on formal employment history doesn't work for gig workers or small traders.

Open Payments and Interoperability

The Interledger Protocol (ILP) is built on a simple but powerful idea: payments should work like email. You don't need the same email provider as the person you're writing to. The protocols handle the translation.

The same should be true for payments. You shouldn't need the same wallet, the same bank, or even the same currency as the person you're paying. The system should handle interoperability.

This matters for financial inclusion because it breaks down the siloes. A rural cooperative in Mexico should be able to send payments to members using whatever system those members actually have: mobile money, a bank account, a digital wallet. Not just the one system the cooperative happens to use.

The Interledger Foundation has been funding exactly these kinds of projects.  

The People's Clearinghouse in Mexico, for instance, is working to connect rural co-ops that have been historically excluded from the national payment system, serving over 200,000 people across indigenous and marginalized communities.

Village banking and stokvel projects in South Africa and Zambia are helping women-led savings groups connect to the broader financial ecosystem. In Uganda, where there are 48 million people but only 20 million bank accounts, millions of people participate in SACCOs (Savings and Credit Cooperatives) that operate outside the formal banking system. Interledger Foundation-funded projects are working to digitize these SACCOs and connect them through ILP.

Data That Actually Serves Users

Here's something that doesn't often come to mind: data trails can reduce financial exclusion, if used responsibly.

Two billion low-income people are now generating digital data trails: from mobile money transactions, from utility bill payments, from small business sales. That data can be used to assess creditworthiness for people who have no formal credit history.

Research from CGAP shows that transactional data (sales, purchases, restocking patterns) has similar predictive power for credit risk as traditional credit history. Which means financial service providers can lend to small retailers, platform workers, and micro-enterprises who've never had access to formal credit, without taking on additional risk.

But, and this is critical, this only works if designed with inclusion in mind. The same data can be used to exclude, to discriminate, to exploit. The difference is governance: who controls the data, who benefits from it, and whether there are real protections in place.

Open finance frameworks can help here. They give people control over their own data and create a more level playing field among providers. Instead of data being locked in silos controlled by a few large institutions, open finance lets customers share their full financial picture with providers who can actually serve them.

Early evidence from Brazil and India, both early adopters of open finance, shows this working. In Brazil, Banco do Brasil used open finance data to raise credit limits by over 700 million reais for customers who opted in. In India, the Account Aggregator framework led to a 25% reduction in credit application costs and a 60% increase in user engagement for some providers.

The key phrase: who opted in. This only works if it's customer-controlled

What We Are Teaching Students

This is exactly why financial inclusion is core to our Open Payments Innovation Lab.

We're not training students to build the next fintech unicorn (though if that happens, great). We're training them to ask the right questions:

• Who gets excluded by this design, and why?

• Whose data is this, and who benefits from its use?

• What does interoperability actually mean for users on the ground?

• How do we build systems that serve people who've been historically excluded—not as an afterthought, but by design?

Because the technology exists. ILP works. Open finance frameworks exist. Digital wallets and mobile money are proven.

The question is whether we build these systems to genuinely serve everyone, or whether we just recreate existing inequalities in digital form.