Financial inclusion has made remarkable strides over the past 15 years, but a massive gap remains: 1.3 billion adults worldwide still lack access to any formal financial account, and policymakers are now turning to artificial intelligence and open finance frameworks as essential tools to reach the hardest-to-serve populations. The challenge is no longer simply expanding basic banking access; it's about ensuring that the next wave of financial innovation actually reaches the people who need it most, rather than deepening existing inequalities.

What's Changed in Financial Inclusion Over the Past Decade?

The progress has been substantial. In low- and middle-income countries, 75 percent of adults now hold a transaction account, up from just 51 percent globally in 2011. Mobile money and digital financial services have been the primary drivers of this expansion, enabling people in remote areas and informal economies to access banking without needing a physical branch. Adults in developing countries have also increased their use of formal savings accounts by 23 percentage points since 2011, and digital payment adoption has jumped 28 percentage points.

Yet these headline numbers mask a troubling reality. The remaining unbanked population represents the hardest-to-reach segment: people in remote geographies, those working in informal economies, individuals with limited digital literacy or connectivity, and populations historically excluded by financial product design, including women. Beyond account access, the challenges are even broader. Up to 4 billion people in emerging economies lack adequate insurance coverage, only 35 percent of working-age individuals globally contribute to a pension, and the financing gap for small and medium-sized businesses in developing economies stands at $4 trillion.

Perhaps most concerning, having a bank account has not automatically translated into financial security for many. Nearly half of adults in low- and middle-income countries cannot cover even one month of household expenses in an emergency. Financial inclusion, in other words, means more than just opening an account; it means building genuine financial resilience.

How Can AI and New Technologies Help Reach the Unbanked?

A new policy roadmap released by the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP) outlines how emerging technologies can address these persistent gaps, but only if policymakers act intentionally to ensure benefits are widely shared. The roadmap identifies several technological approaches with genuine promise for inclusive finance:

• Generative and Agentic AI: Voice interfaces and automated AI agents can hyper-personalize financial journeys, expand consumer choice, and lower language barriers for people with limited literacy, making financial services more accessible to non-English speakers and those unfamiliar with traditional banking interfaces.
• Data-Driven Credit Assessment: Transactional data can predict creditworthiness with accuracy comparable to, and sometimes exceeding, traditional credit scoring methods, enabling lenders to serve populations that were previously considered too risky or costly to reach.
• Open Finance Frameworks: Standardized APIs (application programming interfaces) are reshaping competition and data sharing across industries, allowing smaller fintech firms and community banks to compete with larger institutions and reach underserved populations more efficiently.
• Tokenization and Blockchain: These technologies have strong potential to disrupt traditional cross-border payments, financial contracts, and record-keeping, reducing costs and friction for remittances and international transactions that are critical for many developing economies.
• Embedded Financial Services: Financial products are becoming integrated into everyday commerce and non-financial platforms, making banking services ubiquitous rather than requiring customers to visit a separate institution.

The key insight is that these technologies can lower transaction costs, enable providers to better understand customer risk and needs, and create new business models that make serving low-income populations economically viable. However, technology alone is not sufficient. The policy choices made now will determine whether these innovations lead to broader prosperity or increased exclusion.

What Policy Priorities Are Experts Recommending?

The CGAP roadmap outlines six critical policy priorities for financial sector authorities navigating this technological transformation. These priorities reflect a recognition that regulation must evolve alongside innovation to protect consumers while enabling responsible experimentation.

The roadmap emphasizes the need to level the playing field for diverse players, including fintech companies, neobanks, and community banks that may lack the resources of large institutions. It also calls for making payments systems fit for purpose in developing economies, where cash remains dominant and digital infrastructure is still developing. Expanding open finance frameworks to include open data standards is another priority, as is establishing a dedicated approach for inclusive AI that ensures algorithmic decision-making does not perpetuate historical biases or exclude vulnerable populations.

Additionally, policymakers are being urged to create frameworks for responsible tokenization and to build adaptive, innovation-ready regulatory ecosystems that can evolve as technology changes. This last point is particularly important: regulators must move away from static rules that become outdated quickly and toward principles-based approaches that can accommodate new business models and technologies.

Why Does This Matter Now?

The timing is critical. Financial services are undergoing a fundamental transformation, moving from discrete products delivered through isolated channels to ubiquitous, modular services embedded in daily life. Platform-based finance, Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) models, and neobanks are intensifying competition and spurring innovation, but they are also creating new risks and regulatory challenges that policymakers are only beginning to address.

The choices made by financial sector authorities, public authorities, funders, and development partners in the coming months and years will have lasting consequences. If policymakers get this right, the next wave of financial innovation could finally unlock solutions to problems that have seemed intractable for decades: reaching remote populations, serving informal workers, providing affordable credit to small businesses, and building genuine financial security for billions of people. If they get it wrong, these same technologies could deepen existing divides and concentrate financial power even further.

The unbanked 1.3 billion are not waiting. The question is whether the policy infrastructure will be ready to support innovations that actually serve them.