Access Is Not Use
An account is a doorway, not a description of what happens inside. This chapter follows the account through saving, payments, and borrowing, then asks whether those uses improve a household’s ability to manage ordinary needs and shocks. The distinction matters for the financial-inclusion question because the same expansion in account ownership can produce very different consequences depending on how people use the account, what terms they face, and how much financial capacity they have around it.
The account becomes valuable through saving and payments
The most direct use of an account is to store money. In low- and middle-income economies, 55 percent of adults reported saving or setting aside money during the year before the 2024 survey. Forty percent saved formally, using an account at a bank or similar institution or a mobile-money account. Formal saving was therefore not a niche behavior among account owners; it was the most common way adults in these economies saved.
The distinction between saving formally and saving at all is important. The 55 percent total includes people who saved through an account as well as people who used semiformal or other methods. An account may offer privacy, a safer place to store money, and a way to separate savings from daily cash. But the survey does not show how much a person saved, how long the money stayed there, or whether the balance was large enough to meet a particular goal. A higher formal-saving rate is evidence of wider use, not proof that households have accumulated adequate reserves.
Mobile money has changed the practical rhythm of saving in several regions. In Sub-Saharan Africa, 23 percent of adults saved formally through a mobile-money account in 2024. In Latin America and the Caribbean, the share was 19 percent. Mobile services can make small deposits easier because a customer may use a nearby agent rather than travel to a bank. The service is especially useful when income arrives in irregular amounts: a person can set aside a small sum soon after receiving money instead of waiting until they have enough to justify a larger, less frequent deposit.
Frequency matters because financial behavior is shaped by transaction costs. The Findex report found that nearly half of formal savers in low- and middle-income economies saved monthly, while a smaller share saved weekly. In Sub-Saharan Africa, people using mobile money to save were more likely to make weekly deposits than those saving only through a bank or similar institution. That pattern is consistent with the local-agent mechanism: when the service is close and deposits can be small, saving can fit more easily into a household’s cash flow.
Payments create a second kind of value. Across low- and middle-income economies, 62 percent of adults made or received at least one digital payment in the year before the survey, including 82 percent of account owners. Digital payments can reduce travel and waiting time, lower the risk of carrying cash, and create a record of transactions. A record may help a customer demonstrate financial activity when applying for other services, although the existence of a record does not guarantee that a lender will use it well or that the product offered will be affordable.
Payments also connect people to other parts of the economy. Wages, government transfers, remittances, and sales proceeds can arrive in an account rather than being collected entirely in cash. Once money enters an account, saving and spending become easier to separate, and the user may be able to make payments without travelling to the provider. But this benefit depends on the surrounding system: reliable connectivity, interoperable payment rails, enough agents or cash-out points, clear fees, and a consumer-protection regime that makes errors and disputes recoverable.
That is why digital payment use should not be read as a simple measure of financial health. A digital transaction can be faster than a cash transaction, but a user can still pay an unexpected fee, send money to the wrong person, or depend on someone else to navigate the account. The channel reduces some frictions while creating new demands for attention, authentication, and understanding.
The account also changes state as it is used. A person may open it to receive a payment, leave the balance untouched, withdraw everything immediately, or begin making regular deposits. Those states have different implications. An account used only as a temporary pass-through may provide access to a payment without building savings. An account used regularly can create a clearer record of income and spending, but it also exposes the user to more opportunities for fees, mistakes, unauthorized access, or pressure to buy additional products. The important question is therefore not simply whether the account exists, but what relationship of control and use develops around it.
This matters especially when payments replace cash. Cash makes some transactions difficult to trace, but it is familiar and can be used without a device or network. Digital payments can be faster and easier to document, yet they require a working chain of technology and trust. A failed network, an unavailable agent, an unclear confirmation message, or an unrecoverable mistake can turn a nominally convenient payment into a financial loss. The same design choice that increases speed—fewer steps, automated prompts, or remote approval—can also reduce the time a user has to notice an error. Inclusion quality is partly the quality of these trade-offs.
The sequence makes two paths visible. Saving and payments can create liquidity and records that help a household manage money. Borrowing supplies a larger sum, but it also creates a future obligation. Both paths pass through the same account infrastructure, yet they should not be evaluated with the same metric.
Borrowing changes the state of the relationship
People borrow because they need cash they do not currently have. In low- and middle-income economies, 59 percent of adults borrowed money in 2024 from at least one source. Only 24 percent borrowed formally through a bank or similar financial institution, a credit card, or a mobile-money provider. The rest relied on family or friends, savings clubs, or other methods, sometimes alongside formal credit.
The difference between total borrowing and formal borrowing is not a technical footnote. Informal credit can be fast and socially accessible, but it may depend on reciprocal obligations or relationships that are difficult to sustain when an entire community experiences the same shock. Formal credit may be more standardized and can support investment, but it can also impose interest, fees, collateral requirements, and fixed repayment dates. The source of funds changes who bears the risk when income arrives late or an expense is larger than expected.
“Formal” is not a synonym for “safe,” just as “informal” is not a synonym for “harmful.” Formality tells us something about the provider and the channel, not whether the product fits the borrower’s circumstances. A regulated lender may still offer a loan with a repayment schedule that conflicts with irregular income. A family loan may carry no stated interest but create an obligation to provide help later, precisely when the borrower’s community is under pressure. The relevant comparison is therefore not only the label attached to the source. It is the combination of price, timing, flexibility, recourse, and the borrower’s capacity to absorb failure.
The distinction also matters at different levels. For a household, a loan can be useful even if it is too small to affect national credit aggregates. For a financial system, a large rise in the number of small loans can still matter if it changes portfolio composition, underwriting practices, or repayment correlations across many borrowers. The Findex survey helps describe the first perspective—who borrowed and from where—while a credit-cycle dataset is needed to determine whether those changes amount to a system-wide acceleration.
The headline borrowing rate also says nothing about loan size. A small short-term advance and a large business loan are both counted as borrowing, even though they have different implications for the borrower and the financial system. Nor does the rate reveal whether a person borrowed to invest, smooth consumption, pay a medical bill, buy food between paydays, or replace a previous loan. Interpreting borrowing as either empowerment or exploitation without these details goes beyond what the survey can establish.
Access gaps continue after an account is opened. In low- and middle-income economies, 22 percent of women borrowed formally compared with 26 percent of men. Among account owners, the gap remained: 29 percent of women with an account borrowed formally compared with 33 percent of men. Poorer adults were less likely than wealthier adults to borrow formally, and rural residents were less likely than urban residents to do so. These differences show that an account does not remove every barrier to credit. Lenders may still require documentation, a stable income, collateral, a transaction history, or confidence that the product can be used safely.
The same point applies to saving. Women and poorer adults were less likely than men and wealthier adults to save formally, even among account owners. A gap that persists after access has been granted may reflect income volatility, employment, household control over money, product design, or the cost of maintaining a balance. It is therefore not enough to ask who has an account. A serious inclusion measure must ask who can use it for the purpose that matters.
Financial health supplies that outcome boundary. The Findex framework describes financially healthy people as able to meet obligations, pursue goals, cope with shocks, and feel confident about their financial lives. On the resilience measure used in the 2024 survey, 56 percent of adults in low- and middle-income economies could obtain emergency money without much difficulty. But only 34 percent said they could cover more than two months of expenses if they lost their main source of income. A person can therefore have an account and still have a very limited buffer.
The source of emergency money matters too. Family or friends were the most common source across much of the low- and middle-income world, but they were not always reliable. Women were six percentage points more likely than men to rely on family or friends, while they were less likely to rely on additional work. Poorer adults were less likely than wealthier adults to rely on savings. These patterns are not proof that an account caused or failed to cause resilience. They show that households enter the financial system with different buffers and different fallback options.
Financial worry reveals another boundary. Thirty percent of adults in low- and middle-income economies were most worried about monthly expenses, and 26 percent about medical costs. Eighteen percent saved formally for old age. These measures are subjective and the wording of the 2024 worry question changed from the previous survey, so they should not be treated as a clean time series. Even so, they show why formal access has to be connected to the needs people are trying to manage. An account that makes payments easier may be valuable; it does not by itself solve an unstable income, an expensive illness, or a missing emergency reserve.
This is also where credit and resilience can pull in opposite directions. Borrowing may prevent a household from selling an asset or cutting essential consumption after a shock. It may also add a recurring payment to a budget that is already under pressure. Whether the result is stabilizing depends on the loan’s amount, price, maturity, purpose, and repayment schedule—none of which a yes-or-no borrowing question can identify.
Financial health is therefore both an outcome and a buffer around the credit relationship. A household with savings, reliable income, or dependable support may use a loan to pursue an opportunity and repay it without reducing essential consumption. A household already worried about bills or medical costs may use the same formal channel to postpone a problem, transferring pressure from today’s expense to tomorrow’s repayment. The survey cannot determine how often each pathway occurs, but it can show why the distinction matters: low resilience makes the consequences of a poorly matched credit product more severe.
That household-level vulnerability also helps explain why borrower growth deserves context. If more people enter formal credit while their financial buffers remain thin, the number of accounts alone cannot tell us whether the system is broadening opportunity or distributing obligations faster than households can absorb them. The later macro-financial question depends on connecting this lived-use evidence to measures of borrower growth, aggregate credit, and repayment stress.
What the use data can—and cannot—tell us
The Findex numbers establish that accounts are being used, that formal saving and digital payments have expanded, and that formal borrowing remains less common than either saving or payments in low- and middle-income economies. They also show that use is distributed unevenly and that financial resilience remains limited for many adults. Those are meaningful findings because they connect infrastructure to lived behavior.
They do not, however, identify a credit boom, deteriorating underwriting, or future banking distress. The survey is designed to describe people’s access and reported behavior, not to follow every loan through its repayment history. To study the system-level risk of rapid borrower growth, researchers need a different layer of data: how the number of borrowers and loan accounts changes over time, how aggregate private credit moves relative to the economy, and what happens to nonperforming loans, bank stability, or output afterward.
The practical lesson is simple but demanding. Read account ownership as the start of a financial relationship, saving and payments as evidence of use, borrowing as a new obligation, and financial health as the test of whether the relationship is helping people manage their lives. Only after those distinctions are clear does it make sense to ask when rapid credit inclusion becomes a warning signal for the wider system.