APRIL 2025
Unlocking Financial
Inclusion
The Power of Innovative Technologies
By Romina Bandura, Madeleine McLean, and Esteban Cherquis
Introduction
Financial services are a powerful driver of human well-being, enabling businesses to operate and raise
capital and households to save, manage economic shocks, and invest in essential needs like education
and health. However, across many developing countries, access to aordable and comprehensive
nancial services—which are key to promoting nancial inclusion—remains out of reach for many
people. A series of infrastructural, economic, regulatory, and social barriers limit the participation of
millions of individuals in nancial services.
Technological solutions have the potential to help overcome some of these barriers by lowering costs,
promoting competition in traditionally concentrated markets, and better serving consumers’ varied and
unique needs. The introduction of mobile phones in the early 2000s removed the need to use physical
banking services and simplied onerous identication processes, granting access to payments and
credit for many individuals who were previously unbanked. As a result of mobile telephony, today 3
billion people (57 percent of mobile subscribers) use mobile nancial services worldwide. In addition,
mobile telephony contributed to 5.8 percent of global GDP in 2024, and is projected to account for 8.4
percent of global GDP by 2030.
Over the past decade, innovative developments have come from cloud, mobile, and social technoloy.
Developing countries have mostly seized the opportunity to build and strengthen their own digital
public infrastructure, including by innovating with fast payments systems. However, given that those
systems still rely on legacy infrastructure, the benets behind fast payment systems have been primarily
contained to domestic markets.
