Every few years, the World Bank publishes the Global Findex Database — the most comprehensive snapshot of how people around the world access and use financial services. The 2025 edition, based on surveys of 145,000 adults across 141 countries conducted during 2024, is now out, and its findings are both encouraging and sobering.

Yes, more people have financial accounts than ever before. But account ownership is only the beginning of the story. Financial health, financial resilience, and the skills to make smart money decisions are still out of reach for billions of people — and that’s where financial education becomes not just helpful, but essential.

This post breaks down the key findings of the Findex 2025 report, explains what they mean in plain language, and connects them to a central theme of this site: access to finance and financial education are not competitors. They are partners. And both are needed for people to truly improve their financial lives.

What is the Global Findex?

Before diving into the numbers, it’s worth understanding what the Global Findex Database is and why it matters.

Every few years, the World Bank surveys hundreds of thousands of ordinary adults around the world — farmers, workers, shopkeepers, students, retirees — and asks them a simple set of questions:

– Do you have a bank account?

– Do you save money?

– Do you borrow?

– Can you handle a financial emergency?

– How do you pay your bills?

The resulting database, now in its fifth edition (with data from 2011, 2014, 2017, 2021, and now 2025), is the global gold standard for measuring financial inclusion.

Policy makers, researchers, NGOs, and governments use it to track progress, identify gaps, and design programmes to bring more people into the financial system.

The 2025 edition, published by authors Leora Klapper, Dorothe Singer, Laura Starita, and Alexandra Norris, adds something new: for the first time, it includes a dedicated Digital Connectivity Tracker, measuring mobile phone and internet access alongside financial data.

This addition reflects a key insight: in today’s world, financial access and digital access are increasingly the same thing.

The Headline Numbers: Remarkable Progress

Let’s start with the good news. The numbers on financial access have improved dramatically over the past 14 years.

In 2011, just over half the world had any kind of financial account. By 2024, that number is almost four in five adults. That’s over a billion more people brought into the formal financial system in just over a decade. By any measure, that is a remarkable achievement.

Mobile money has been the engine behind much of this growth. Accounts accessible on basic mobile phones — no branch, no paperwork, no minimum balance — have been transformative, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, 40% of adults had a mobile money account as of 2024, up from 27% in 2021. In Latin America and the Caribbean, that figure jumped from 22% to 37% in just three years. These are not incremental changes — they represent millions of people gaining access to financial services for the first time.

Having an Account Is Not the Same as Being Financially Healthy

Here is where the Findex 2025 report delivers its most important message — and the one that resonates most deeply with the mission of this site.

Despite the surge in account ownership, financial health has not kept pace. The report defines financial health as

“the ability to meet financial needs without undue stress, pursue goals, cope with financial shocks, and feel confident about one’s finances”.

On that measure, the picture is far less rosy.

Read those numbers again. More than four in ten people in developing economies could not reliably access emergency funds.

Two-thirds of people without accounts — the very people targeted by financial inclusion efforts — say they would need help using one. And one in three adults can cover less than a month of expenses if something goes wrong.

Opening a bank account does not automatically make someone financially resilient. It doesn’t teach them to save, budget, borrow wisely, or recognise a scam. It gives them a tool.

But a tool without knowledge and confidence is often unused — or worse, misused.

Who Is Still Being Left Behind?

The Findex report is honest about the gaps that remain. Progress has been real, but it has not been evenly distributed.

The Unbanked: 1.3 Billion People

Despite the progress, 1.3 billion adults worldwide still lack any form of financial account. That is a staggering number. And it is not random who these people are: they are disproportionately women, disproportionately poor, and disproportionately rural.

The Gender Gap

Gender gaps in account ownership have been narrowing — which is good news.

But 73% of women in low- and middle-income economies have accounts, compared to a higher share of men. In South Asia and parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, women are significantly less likely to own mobile phones, which increasingly means less access to financial services. Women are also more likely to rely on family or friends for emergency money, and less likely to have independent financial confidence.

The Connectivity Gap

In low- and middle-income economies, 31% of adults without a financial account also don’t own a mobile phone. In South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, that figure rises to about 50%. These people are doubly excluded: they lack both financial access and digital access. For them, a mobile money account — which requires a phone — is not yet an option.

The Activity Gap

Having an account doesn’t mean using it. In India, 16% of account owners have what the report calls ‘inactive accounts’ — they opened one (often to receive a government payment) and never really used it. The average across other low- and middle-income economies is 4%, but even that represents millions of people with dormant accounts sitting unused.

This matters because the benefits of financial inclusion — the ability to save, build credit history, access insurance — only come when accounts are actively used. Passive ownership delivers almost nothing.

The Digital Revolution — And Its Risks

One of the most striking aspects of the 2025 Findex is its focus on digital connectivity. This is the first edition to systematically measure mobile phone and internet access alongside financial data — and the connection between the two is profound.

Smartphones are now the primary way people in developing countries access the internet. Nearly all internet users — around 92% of smartphone owners — go online via their phones. Social media reaches 45% of all adults globally. E-commerce, digital payments, and mobile money are reshaping how people earn, spend, and save.

But this digital revolution brings risks, and the report does not shy away from them.

These are not small risks. In an environment where someone’s entire savings might sit in a mobile money account protected by nothing more than a four-digit PIN — or no password at all — the stakes are high. And when things go wrong, there is often no easy remedy.

The report also finds that a significant share of people pay unexpected fees when withdrawing money — fees they didn’t know about, or didn’t understand. In Sub-Saharan Africa, nearly one in four government payment recipients paid higher fees than expected. In Latin America and the Caribbean, about one in four wage recipients faced the same problem.

This isn’t just an inconvenience. Unexpected fees erode trust in financial systems. They disproportionately hit poorer people who can least afford them. And they signal a critical gap in financial understanding.

Financial Health: The Goal Beyond the Account

Section 4 of the Findex 2025 report is titled ‘Financial Health,’ and it is arguably the most important part of the entire document. It asks: once people have accounts, are they actually doing better?

The answer is: not automatically. Financial health requires more than access. It requires understanding, habits, and the right financial products.

What People Worry About

The report asked people across the world what financial issue worries them most. The results are illuminating:

Look at the retirement savings figure. Only 26% of people worry about retirement, yet only 18% actually save for it. Even among those who list it as a concern, most are not acting on it. This is a textbook example of the gap between knowing what you should do and actually doing it — a gap that financial education is specifically designed to close.

Financial Resilience: Can People Handle a Shock?

Financial resilience means the ability to withstand unexpected financial setbacks — a medical emergency, a job loss, a natural disaster.

The Findex 2025 tracks this carefully, and the findings are challenging.

Only 56% of adults in low- and middle-income economies could access emergency money with minimal difficulty. Just one third could cover expenses for more than two months if they lost their income. The rest — the majority — are living with little or no financial buffer.

Importantly, this figure has not improved since 2021, even as account ownership has risen. More people have accounts, but they’re not necessarily saving more, planning better, or feeling more secure. The gap between access and resilience is real and persistent.

Why Financial Education Cannot Be an Afterthought

This is where the Sweat Your Assets perspective becomes important.

The Findex data show something that should not surprise anyone who has thought carefully about these issues: access to financial tools is necessary but not sufficient. People also need the knowledge, skills, and confidence to use those tools well.

The Knowledge Gap

The Findex 2025 finds that two-thirds of adults without a bank account say they would need help using one if they were to open one.

That is not a technology problem or an access problem. It is a financial literacy problem.

In South Asia, women without accounts are 19 percentage points more likely than men to say they’d need help using one. This is not because women are less capable — it’s because they have had fewer opportunities to learn, practice, and build confidence with financial systems.

Knowledge gaps also show up in more subtle ways. Many people pay fees they didn’t expect and don’t know how to challenge them. Many save without earning interest — because they don’t know how to ask. Many borrow informally from family and friends at significant social cost, when formal alternatives might be cheaper and more appropriate.

The Confidence Gap

Financial confidence — feeling capable and secure in managing your finances — is a key component of financial health as defined by the Findex. And the data reveal a significant confidence deficit, especially among women, poorer adults, and those new to formal financial services.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, only about half of mobile money account owners have a password on their phone. Some of this is a technology limitation (basic phones don’t support biometrics), but awareness and education also play a role. Broader campaigns to help people understand why and how to protect their accounts could make a significant difference.

About 17% of adults in South Asia who receive government payments in a bank account rely on a family member or friend to collect the money for them. This is a sign of dependency that limits financial autonomy — and it can often be addressed through targeted support and education.

The Behaviour Gap

Perhaps the most important insight from financial psychology is the gap between knowledge and behaviour.

People often know what they should do — save more, borrow carefully, plan for retirement — and still don’t do it.

The reasons are complex: present bias (preferring immediate rewards over future benefits), lack of accessible savings products, social pressures, and the sheer difficulty of planning when living month to month.

Financial education, when well-designed, helps bridge this gap. Not by lecturing people about compound interest, but by:

– helping them understand their own financial situation

– set realistic goals, and

– build the habits that make those goals achievable.

The evidence from the Findex and from broader research is that targeted, practical financial education — combined with well-designed financial products — makes a real difference.

Access and Education: Partners, Not Substitutes

It is tempting to think of financial inclusion (giving people access to accounts, payments, and credit) and financial education (teaching people how to manage money) as two separate initiatives. Some argue that access alone will solve the problem; others argue that education is what really matters. The Findex 2025 makes clear that both perspectives are incomplete.

This is precisely the argument the Findex 2025 makes in its chapter on financial health and confidence. Access to financial services creates the opportunity for financial wellbeing. But realising that opportunity requires knowledge, skills, and good habits — and these are the domain of financial education.

The Three Pillars of Financial Wellbeing

Think of it this way. Financial well-being — the ability to live comfortably within your means, handle setbacks, and work toward a secure future — rests on three interconnected pillars:

Remove any one of these three pillars and the whole structure weakens. An account with no education means a dormant card. Education with no access means theory without practice. Access and education without consumer protection means people are left vulnerable to exploitation.

This is why the Findex 2025, despite being fundamentally a report about financial access, returns again and again to themes of financial literacy, product design, onboarding, and consumer protection. The authors understand that access is a means, not an end. The end is financial health.

What the Findex 2025 Recommends — And What It Means for You

The report concludes with a set of clear priorities for governments, financial institutions, and policymakers. But each of them also has implications for ordinary people thinking about their own financial lives. Let’s break them down:

The Bottom Line

The Global Findex 2025 is fundamentally an optimistic document.

It shows that financial inclusion efforts are working: more people have accounts, more people are saving formally, more payments are going digital, and gender and income gaps are narrowing.

But the report is also clear-eyed about what remains. 1.3 billion people are still unbanked.

Financial resilience has not improved despite rising account ownership. Most people lack confidence in financial products. And the digital revolution, for all its promise, brings new risks alongside new opportunities.

The path forward, as the Findex makes clear, is not to choose between access and education. It is to pursue both simultaneously — and to insist that financial systems be designed to serve and protect the people who use them, not just to capture them as customers.