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Global Findex shows account ownership has grown across the globe and three out of four adults worldwide today have a financial account.
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The relationship between receiving a digital payment and the use of other financial services suggests it is becoming easier for people to keep money in their accounts until it is needed.
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Researchers also show that digitalizing wage payments can encourage workers to save and improve financial resilience and financial savviness.
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The challenge for businesses and governments is to ensure that digital payments are safer, more affordable and more transparent than cash-based alternatives.
The latest edition of the Global Findex shows that account ownership has grown across the globe and three out of four adults worldwide today have a financial account. Yet 1.4 billion adults remain unbanked. How can policies and products help bring more unbanked adults into the financial system?
Insights from the Global Findex Database 2021 about the ways in which account owners use their account for payments, saving, and borrowing—and how these financial services interact as part of a broader financial ecosystem—reveal a key opportunity for expanding financial inclusion. Namely, by leveraging payments, one of the financial transactions that unbanked adults already make.
Payments into an account serve as a gateway for using other financial services
People who receive payments into an account are more likely than non-recipients to use their accounts to store money for cash management, make payments, and save and borrow formally.
Global Findex 2021 data show that in developing economies, 20 percent of adults received a wage payment—from the private sector or from the government—into an account (figure 1). Almost all (91 percent) of those recipients also made a digital payment from their account. At the same time, about 70 percent of those who received a payment into their account also used their account to store money for cash management, about half used their account to save money and about half to borrow money.