In news– World Bank has released the Global Findex Database 2021 recently.
About the database-
- The database is titled as The Global Findex Database 2021: Financial Inclusion, Digital Payments, and Resilience in the Age of COVID-19.
- It has surveyed how people in 123 economies use financial services throughout 2021.
- It contains updated indicators on access to and use of formal and informal financial services and digital payments, and offers insights into the behaviors that enable financial resilience.
- The data also identify gaps in access to and usage of financial services by women and poor adults.
- Since 2011 the Global Findex Database has been the definitive source of data on global access to financial services from payments to savings and borrowing.
Key findings-
Following are the key fings of the database-
- Worldwide account ownership has reached 76 percent of the global population and 71 percent of people in developing countries
- 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.
- Receiving digital payments such as a wage payment, a government transfer, or a domestic remittance, catalyzes the use of other financial services, such as storing, saving, and borrowing money.
- In developing economies, 40 percent of adults who paid utility bills (18 percent of adults ) did so directly from an account.
- In China, 80 percent of adults made a digital merchant payment, whereas in other developing economies 20% of adults did so.
- COVID-19 boosted the adoption of digital financial services: 40 percent of adults in developing economies excluding China who made a digital merchant payment using a card, phone, or the internet, and one-third of adults in developing economies who paid a utility bill directly from an account, did so for the first time after the start of the pandemic.
- Mobile money has become an important enabler of financial inclusion in Sub-Saharan Africa—especially for women, both as a driver of account ownership and of account usage through mobile payments, saving, and borrowing.
- About half of adults in developing economies could access extra funds within 30 days if faced with an unexpected expense.
- As per this report, India is among seven countries home to half the world’s 1.4 billion adults without access to formal banking.
- People without an account at a financial institution or a mobile money service provider have been classified as unbanked.
- 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.
- These four countries, together with Bangladesh, Egypt and Nigeria, have 54 per cent or 740 million people of the global unbanked population.
- It has found that women are more likely to be unbanked than men.
- Larger gender gaps among the unbanked with no ID were observed in Benin, Cote d’Ivoire and Liberia.
- Brazil, China, Kenya, Russia and Thailand have relatively high account ownership rates, yet a majority of those still unbanked are women.
