The World Bank’s Global Findex Database 2025, based on surveys of roughly 145,000 adults across 141 economies, found that 79% of adults worldwide now hold an account with a bank or mobile money provider, up from 74% in 2021 and just 51% in 2011. In Pakistan, Raast has made instant payments genuinely free and instant, while the digital merchant network has expanded faster in a single year than it did across the previous decade.
Fintech has moved from the margins of the financial system to the centre of the inclusion agenda. But as digital access expands, a different challenge is becoming more important: whether institutions have the people, processes, and operating capability to help customers use these services confidently.
An account is a door, but opening a door is not the same as walking through it. Real inclusion begins when someone can save with confidence, get paid reliably, access support when something goes wrong, and borrow when their business needs it. The next stage of financial inclusion will therefore depend not only on better technology, but on the human capability built around it.
What the Financial Inclusion Gap Actually Looks Like
Financial inclusion is often reduced to a single statistic: how many people have an account. It is a useful number, and it is nowhere near the whole story.
The Global Findex 2025 reports that around 1.3 billion adults worldwide still have no financial account at all, and that more than 650 million of them live in just eight economies. Pakistan is one of them, alongside Bangladesh, China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Mexico, and Nigeria.
That is not a coincidence of geography. It reflects a set of very practical obstacles that the same report identifies: distance from a branch, documentation that is difficult to produce, fees that are hard to justify on a small income, and, for many households, the simple reality that there has not been much to put in an account in the first place.
Then there is the gap inside the gap. Pakistan’s gender disparity in financial access has been among the widest in the region. It is narrowing, however. In an interview with the Financial Alliance for Women, the State Bank of Pakistan reported that its Banking on Equality policy had reduced the gender gap in financial inclusion from 39% in 2021 to 34% by 2024, while banks hired over 13,000 women and lifted the share of women in their workforces from 13% to 17%.
An account, in other words, is the beginning of inclusion. It is not the same thing.
What Fintech Makes Possible
None of that diminishes what digital finance has made possible. A branch-based model was never going to serve a country of Pakistan’s size efficiently. The Asian Development Bank’s Development Asia notes that in 2022 Pakistan had only 10.8 commercial bank branches per 100,000 adults, one of the lowest ratios in the region. Building physical infrastructure to reach every underserved district would take decades the country does not have.
Digital rails change that arithmetic. A mobile wallet costs a fraction of a branch. An agent network reaches places a bank building never will. And instant payment infrastructure lowers the cost of moving money to something close to zero, which matters enormously when the amounts being moved are small. Raast, the State Bank’s instant payment system launched in 2021, processed over 102 million person-to-person payments in 2023, up from 7.9 million the year before, according to ADB’s Development Asia.
The momentum has continued. At a review of the Cashless Pakistan initiative chaired by the Ministry of State for Finance in July 2026, officials reported that annual digital transactions had risen from 6.9 billion to 11.3 billion in a year, that active digital payment merchants had grown from 500,000 to over two million, and that headline financial inclusion had reached 69%.
Much of that progress comes through the most compelling route available: government transfers, salaries, and pensions increasingly arrive in digital accounts rather than as cash, which brings people into the formal system because that is where their money now lands.
This is real progress, and it happened quickly.
Where Human Capability Becomes Critical
The Global Findex 2025 contains a finding that should give every product team pause. Among adults in low- and middle-income economies who do not have an account, roughly two-thirds say they would need help using one if they opened it. In South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, and Europe and Central Asia, women are at least 19 percentage points more likely than men to say so.
That is not an access problem. It is a confidence problem, and no amount of infrastructure will fix it.
Trust is the second barrier. Analysis of the Findex data by CGAP found that 22% of unbanked adults in low- and middle-income countries distrust financial institutions outright, while 18% of adults without a mobile money account cite safety concerns. The same analysis notes that 19% of phone owners in these markets reported receiving scam or extortion messages. When someone loses money to a fraudulent transfer, they do not conclude that they used the app incorrectly. They conclude that the system is not for them, and they go back to cash.
And cash remains stubbornly attractive for reasons that have little to do with user experience. It is understood. It leaves no record. Research published in the Research Consortium Archive in 2026 describes a “high-low adoption paradox” in Pakistan, in which high transaction growth coexists with a resilient cash economy, driven partly by small businesses’ concern about tax scrutiny once their transactions become visible. Informality can look like the safer option, even when it is the more expensive one.
The Workforce Challenge Behind Financial Inclusion
These barriers change the nature of the challenge. Financial institutions do not only need better platforms. They need product teams that understand underserved users, frontline employees who can explain unfamiliar services clearly, support teams equipped to resolve problems quickly, and operating models that can maintain consistent service as networks expand.
That requires workforce planning, role clarity, structured training, effective performance management, and people operations capable of supporting teams across different locations and customer segments. Technology may extend an institution’s reach, but organisational capability determines the quality of what happens when it gets there.
Four Capabilities That Turn Access Into Inclusion
Turning digital access into sustained financial participation requires four organisational capabilities working together.
Design for the actual user, not the assumed one. A product built for a smartphone-fluent urban professional will not serve a woman running a home-based business on a basic handset. This is not hypothetical: the Global Findex 2025 found that women in low- and middle-income economies are nine percentage points less likely than men to own a mobile phone at all, and that basic phones remain common across South Asia. Local-language interfaces, flows that survive a patchy connection, and onboarding that assumes no prior banking experience are not accessibility extras. For a large share of the addressable market, they are the product.
Make trust a design requirement. Clear pricing with no surprise fees, transparent recourse when something goes wrong, and fraud protection that is visible to the customer. CGAP’s analysis of the Findex data found that 13% of adults in low- and middle-income countries receiving government transfers or pensions into accounts paid higher withdrawal fees than they expected. Small breaches of trust like that are expensive, because they are remembered.
Solve for usage, not sign-ups. A dormant account is a metric, not an outcome. The Global Findex 2025 found that only 56% of adults in low- and middle-income economies could easily access emergency funds, a figure unchanged since 2021 despite the surge in account ownership. Inclusion means someone can save reliably, receive a payment, and borrow when they need to. Alternative data and transaction histories are beginning to make small-business lending viable where collateral-based models never were, and that is where inclusion starts to translate into economic mobility.
Build frontline capability. If two-thirds of prospective users would need help getting started, agents, community networks, customer-support teams, and financial education cannot be treated as secondary additions. They are part of the delivery model. Institutions need people who can explain products simply, support customers across different levels of digital literacy, recognise signs of fraud, and resolve concerns before they become reasons to return to cash. Technology scales the product. Trained people scale confident adoption.
From Digital Access to Organisational Delivery
Fintech can close a great deal of the gap, and it is already doing so faster than most people expected.
What it cannot do is close the gap alone. Infrastructure creates the possibility of inclusion. Whether that possibility becomes reality depends on things that look much more like organisational capability than code: how products are designed, how frontline teams are trained, how trust is earned and maintained, and how well institutions actually understand the people they are trying to reach.
The countries and companies that get this right will not be the ones with the most sophisticated technology. They will be the ones that paired good technology with a serious understanding of human behaviour, and then built the organisation to deliver both.
Building the Organisation Behind the Technology
Financial inclusion is ultimately delivered by people: the product teams who design for real users, the agents who guide first-time customers, the support teams who resolve concerns, and the leaders who determine what the institution is genuinely optimising for.
At HRSG, we help organisations build the workforce structures and capabilities required to turn ambitious strategies into consistent delivery. From workforce planning and talent deployment to training, people operations, and scalable support models, the objective is the same: ensuring that growth is supported by an organisation equipped to deliver it.
For institutions expanding digital financial services or entering underserved markets, the next competitive advantage may not be another feature. It may be the capability of the people responsible for bringing that feature to life.
FAQs
- What is the financial inclusion gap?
The financial inclusion gap refers to the population of adults who remain outside the formal financial system, without reliable access to payments, savings, credit, or insurance. - How does fintech improve financial inclusion?
Fintech reduces the cost and physical barriers of delivering financial services. Mobile wallets, agent networks, instant payment systems such as the State Bank of Pakistan’s Raast, and digital lending platforms allow institutions to reach people that a branch-based model could never serve economically. - Why isn’t technology enough to close the financial inclusion gap?
Because the remaining barriers are largely behavioural and structural rather than technical. Closing the gap requires product design, consumer protection, financial literacy, and human support alongside the technology. - What role does gender play in financial inclusion in Pakistan?
Pakistan has one of the wider gender gaps in financial access globally, though it is narrowing. The State Bank of Pakistan reports that its Banking on Equality policy reduced the gap from 39% in 2021 to 34% in 2024. Women face additional barriers around documentation, mobile phone ownership, mobility, and social norms, which means inclusive products must be designed with those realities in mind. - What role does human capability play in financial inclusion?
Human capability determines whether customers can understand, trust, and continue using digital financial services. Product teams, frontline agents, customer-support employees, and organisational leaders all play a role in turning initial access into sustained participation.