Global Findex 2025: 1.3 billion adults still unbanked

The Global Findex 2025, the World Bank survey on how the world's adults save, pay, borrow and cope with emergencies, showed that 79% of adults now have an account at a financial institution or a mobile money provider. At the same time, about 1.3 billion adults still have no account at all, and most of them live in developing economies. Of these, about 900 million already have a cell phone.

What happened

The Global Findex has been published by the World Bank since 2011, based on interviews with adults in more than 140 economies. The 2025 edition, with data collected in 2024, brought the latest snapshot of financial inclusion in the world.

The main figures, according to the World Bank: 79% of adults have an account; 40% of adults in developing economies saved money in a financial account in 2024, 16 percentage points more than in 2021; 42% of adults made a digital merchant payment in 2024, versus 35% in 2021; by gender, 77% of women and 81% of men have an account; 84% of adults in low- and middle-income countries have a cell phone, and 3 billion people use a smartphone. Only 56% of adults said they could confidently come up with extra money in an emergency. And one in four adults in low- and middle-income countries faced a natural disaster in the previous three years.

The report confirms a trend from previous editions: the cell phone has become the main gateway to the financial system, and digital payments, from wages to government benefits, drive account opening.

Why it matters

Having an account is not a luxury. It is what allows people to get paid without the risk of robbery, save money without losing it to inflation under the mattress, build a history and, one day, apply for credit. Those left outside pay more for everything: for informal loans, for sending money, for the time spent in lines.

The emergency figure is the harshest. Almost half of the world's adults are not sure they could come up with extra money in an emergency. For those who live off the land, emergencies have names: drought, rain at the wrong time, pests, a price drop. When the harvest fails and there are no savings or credit, the family sells what it has, and sometimes sells its future.

The cell phone changes the game, but not on its own. Having the device is a condition, not a guarantee. Real inclusion depends on services designed for the reality of those at the end of the chain: the rural grower, the market vendor, the informal worker.

In Bairo's view

Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez knows from his own experience what it is like to work and not exist on paper. He says that, after arriving in Brazil, he was left without documents in hand, and years later, when he lost everything, he learned that those who cannot prove what they have done cannot get credit to start over. In his reading, the Findex's 1.3 billion are not a statistic: they are people who work and remain invisible.

For Bairo, the infrastructure that connects agribusiness to the world starts by seeing those who produce. The grower who sells every week at a wholesale supply center has a real financial history, but it lives in notebooks and conversations. In his view, turning that history into a verifiable record is the bridge between those who work and the credit that has not yet arrived.

And he measures by the yardstick he uses for everything, lifetime. The line at the bank, the trip to town to withdraw cash, the week waiting for a payment: all of this is time that does not come back. For Bairo, including people is giving that time back.

Where this meets the ecosystem

CEASA Bank, an agribusiness financial platform founded by Bairo that operates on the infrastructure of an authorized institution, was designed to fit on the phone of those who work at the wholesale supply centers: reference prices, billing in minutes, accounts and payment methods through an authorized institution, and every sale becoming history. Part of this is being implemented.

The BTZ Chain is the ecosystem's public record network, which anyone can check in the explorer, proposed to prove facts and the presence of a real person behind each act. BICOIN, this network's governance coin, has the yardstick "1 BTZ = 1 minute of human life": it measures purpose, is not a price and is not an invitation to buy. Instituto CEASA, the humanitarian front, proposes expanding access to food.

Sources

• World Bank, The Global Findex Database 2025: worldbank.org
• World Bank, full Global Findex 2025 report (PDF): openknowledge.worldbank.org
• World Bank, press release of 07/16/2025: Mobile phone technology powers saving surge in developing economies

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