The Future of Financial Access in Emerging Markets
Currently, more than 1.4 billion adults globally don’t have access to a formal bank account, but global smartphone penetration is commonly estimated at 71% of the world’s population. Most of them live in emerging markets. They have jobs. They have income. What they don’t have is access to that income when they actually need it.
That gap is the story of this newsletter.
Welcome to the first edition of The Access Economy, where we’ll be unpacking how money is earned, accessed, moved, and grown across emerging markets, and why the next decade of financial inclusion won’t look anything like the last one.
What financial access actually means today
For decades, financial access meant one thing: a bank account. If you had one, you were “included.” If you didn’t, you were “unbanked,” and that was treated as the whole problem.
But that definition is outdated. Having an account doesn’t mean having access. Across Pakistan, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and similar markets, millions of people are technically banked; they receive a salary into an account once a month, but are functionally illiquid for three out of every four weeks of it. 57% of workers worldwide live paycheck to paycheck, and the share is 63% in Latin America and 70% in the Middle East and Africa.
Real financial access isn’t about whether you have an account. It’s about whether you have your earned money when you need it.
That increasingly looks less like a banking problem and more like a liquidity problem. And liquidity problems don’t get solved by opening more accounts.
Why emerging markets are skipping traditional finance, not catching up to it
There’s a common assumption in global finance that emerging markets are simply “behind” developed markets, and will eventually follow the same path: branch banking, then cards, then digital apps.
But that assumption doesn’t fully reflect what is actually happening.
Markets like Pakistan, Nigeria, Brazil, and Indonesia are not slowly retracing the same steps. They are evolving along a different trajectory altogether, one shaped by mobile-first behavior, infrastructure constraints, and rapid digital adoption.
Brazil, for example, did not wait for a long transition toward universal branch banking before digitizing payments. With Pix, it leapfrogged directly to a real-time, instant payments system at a national scale.
Brazil’s Pix system reached approximately 70% of the population within just a few years of launch, making it one of the fastest national payment adoptions globally. At peak scale, it processes hundreds of millions of transactions in a single day and has already surpassed cash and debit cards as a preferred payment method.
Kenya took a similar path with M-Pesa, where mobile wallets became not just a payment method, but a foundation for financial identity and everyday transactions.
Today, M-Pesa serves over 40 million active users in Kenya and processes tens of billions of transactions annually, with annual flows reaching over KSh 20 trillion. What began as a simple mobile wallet has evolved into a core financial infrastructure layer, deeply embedded in both consumer behavior and business payments across the country.
This pattern of leapfrogging is now extending beyond payments into income and liquidity. The question is no longer why traditional systems worked the way they did—but whether modern infrastructure can solve today’s problems more directly.
For instance, why should an employee wait 30 days to access income they have already earned, when the infrastructure now exists to enable real-time access?
This is the macro shift worth paying attention to: emerging markets are not simply adopting fintech as a layer on top of traditional finance. They are building financial systems that are more direct, more embedded, and increasingly real-time by design.
The role of fintech: closing the liquidity gap, not just the access gap
This is where embedded finance comes in, and why it’s the real story behind “financial inclusion,” more than any app or interface.
Embedded finance means financial services aren’t a separate destination you go to. They’re built into the systems people already touch every day, such as payroll, e-commerce checkout, invoicing software, and gig platforms. Finance becomes invisible, available exactly at the moment it’s needed.
For an employee, that might mean accessing earned wages before payday, directly inside the payroll system their employer already uses. For an SME, it might mean financing against an invoice the moment it’s issued, instead of waiting 60-90 days to get paid by a client. In both cases, the liquidity gap, not the lack of an account, is the actual problem being solved.
This is the global shift: from banking as a destination, to finance as a layer.
The emerging market gap, in real numbers
The contrast between emerging and developed markets isn’t subtle:
- In developed markets, overdraft facilities, credit cards, and instant transfers absorb short-term liquidity shocks. In many emerging markets, however, those same safety nets are either unavailable to the average salaried worker or prohibitively expensive. In Brazil, for instance, average rates on certain forms of unsecured consumer credit have approached 50% annually, highlighting the cost of bridging short-term cash flow gaps through traditional borrowing.
- Across South Asia, MENA, and Sub-Saharan Africa, millions of salaried workers still rely on family, friends, employers, or informal lenders to bridge cash flow gaps before payday. In fact, more than 45% of adults in these regions borrow through informal or semi-formal channels, highlighting how limited access to affordable short-term liquidity remains.
- The challenge extends beyond individuals. Across emerging markets, between 55% and 68% of SMEs remain underserved by formal financial institutions, contributing to an estimated SME credit gap of nearly $1 trillion. In MENA alone, SMEs make up 96% of all businesses yet receive just 7% of total bank lending, underscoring the disconnect between economic importance and access to capital.
The result is a structural mismatch: income exists, but it’s locked behind timing and infrastructure, not behind creditworthiness or need.
This is the gap embedded finance is built to close.
Access is no longer just banking; it’s liquidity on demand.
When we started building in this space, we assumed the challenge would primarily be about financial inclusion in the traditional sense, bringing more people into formal systems.
What surprised us most wasn’t adoption. It was how universal the liquidity gap actually is, across income levels, geographies, and job types.
From salaried employees waiting for payday to SMEs waiting on receivables, the underlying pattern is the same: income exists, but access to it is delayed by systems designed for a different era.
Over time, we realized this isn’t a “developing market” constraint. It’s a structural one. The difference is that emerging markets are building solutions without legacy infrastructure slowing them down.
That shift changes everything.
It means financial access is no longer about expanding banking infrastructure.
It’s about redesigning how and when money becomes usable.
The future of financial access is not just about where money lives. It’s about when people can use it.
If that’s true, then what are financial systems really optimizing for today?
