Driving Financial Inclusion: The Transformative Role of Fintech

Most of what's published on fintech and financial inclusion is academic research, useful for understanding the trend, but not much help if you're actually building the product.

You need to understand what it actually takes, on an architectural level, to reach clients in previously underserved areas, the potential issues you will encounter, and the transformative role that your technology will play.

Let’s look at what financial inclusion actually requires from the technology, and what that means for the team building it.

At Trio, we provide a variety of companies with senior fintech developers. These developers have production experience on similar projects and understand the nuance of the industry.

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The Actual Size of the Problem

The World Bank's Global Findex 2025 report, based on surveys of over 145,000 adults across 141 economies conducted in 2024, puts the unbanked population at roughly 1.3 billion adults globally.

While that number still seems incredibly high, we need to note that a lot of progress has been made. Global account ownership specifically has climbed to 79%, up from 74% in 2021. That number was a mere 51% when the Findex survey first launched in 2011.

Progress hasn't been evenly distributed, though. The remaining 1.3 billion skew heavily toward women, the poor, and people in low-connectivity regions.

From what we have observed, it seems like mobile has been the primary channel closing this gap. The Findex report specifically credits mobile money, used alone or alongside a traditional account, as the central driver of account-ownership gains in developing economies since 2014.

That volume makes sense when you consider that a smartphone likely reached this previously underserved demographic before a bank branch did.

What's Actually Working

There are a couple of ways fintech is driving financial inclusion right now, providing services to a variety of people who do not have access to more traditional banks.

Mobile money and digital wallets

These tools play a big part in letting someone with a basic smartphone and no bank account send, receive, and store money without ever touching traditional banking infrastructure.

Our developers have commented that mobile money and digital wallets have had the clearest impact.

Fawry in Egypt is a concrete example of what this looks like at scale. The e-payment platform grew to roughly 225,000 service points, handling around three million transactions a day for some 30 million users before going public in an IPO that was 30x oversubscribed.

Alternative credit scoring

Traditional credit scoring assumes a credit history that most unbanked and underbanked people simply don't have as a direct result of their lack of access to credit.

Fintech lenders increasingly build scoring models around alternative data instead.

Some examples of this alternative data include things like mobile payment history, utility bill payments, and even phone usage patterns.

Konfío in Mexico is a real example of this working at a meaningful scale. It is an online lending platform that processed 400,000 loan applications and got capital to more than 22,000 small business borrowers in its first five years, most of whom lacked formal credit history.

Digital identity and simplified KYC

A rigid, document-heavy verification process built for a customer with a stable address and government-issued ID doesn't work well for someone without either.

Building verification flows that work with the identity documents people in a given market actually have is a real product decision.

What Still Doesn't Work Well

Regulatory frameworks in many of the markets where inclusion matters most remain fragmented.

Unfortunately, this has resulted in subpar consumer protection.

Trust itself has emerged as a persistent, measurable barrier in the most current data available, arguably more so than raw access at this point.

That same Global Findex 2025 report found that 22% of unbanked adults across low- and middle-income countries distrust financial institutions outright, rising to nearly one in three specifically in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Some security concerns only add to this, with nearly one in five adults with a phone globally reporting having encountered a financial scam, or as many as 30% in Sub-Saharan Africa and, again, Latin America and the Caribbean.

This distrust quickly becomes a product design constraint. A financial inclusion product succeeding on access alone while ignoring trust and fraud exposure is solving half the problem.

Infrastructure gaps are real too, since products designed and tested on reliable connectivity and modern devices may fail under conditions that involve intermittent connectivity, older devices, and excessively high data costs.

What This Means for Building an Inclusion-Focused Product

The engineering requirements in inclusion-focused products are genuinely different from a typical consumer fintech build.

Low-bandwidth performance is often the deciding factor in whether the product actually reaches its intended users.

Offline-tolerant design, queuing actions to sync once connectivity returns rather than requiring a constant connection, matters more here than in almost any other fintech category.

And alternative-data credit models need genuinely careful engineering, since a model trained on incomplete or biased data can quietly exclude the exact population it was meant to serve.

To increase your chances of success in this space, you need to work with developers who understand the environment.

To connect with us, and find out if our LATAM-based nearshore developers are the right fit for your fintech, book a consult.