According to the Global Findex 2021 report by the World Bank, India is among seven countries home to half the world’s 1.4 billion adults without access to formal banking .
Key highlights
- In 2021, 76 percent of adults worldwide had an account at a financial institution or through a mobile money provider, up from 51 percent in 2011.
- Account ownership in developing economies grew from 63 percent to 71 percent in the last few years due increase in access in dozens of developing economies and in stark contrast to the growth seen from 2011 to 2017, which took place mostly in China or India.
- In Sub-Saharan Africa, mobile money largely drove account ownership increases.
- The gender gap in account ownership across developing economies has fallen to 6 percentage points from 9 percentage points, where it hovered for many years.
- The data now find that 74 percent of men but only 68 percent of women in developing economies had an account. Globally, 78 percent of men and 74 percent of women had an account—a gender gap of 4 percentage points.
- Large shares of the global population without formal banking (130 million and 230 million, respectively) lives in India and China because of their size.
- Pakistan, with 115 million unbanked adults and Indonesia, with 100 million, have the next-largest population without banking access.
- People without an account at a financial institution or a mobile money service provider have been classified as unbanked.
- The Global Findex Database 2021 also found that women are more likely to be unbanked than men. Brazil, China, Kenya, Russia and Thailand have relatively high account ownership rates, yet a majority of those still unbanked are women.
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