Cellphones, fuel jump in bank account ownership

NEW YORK—Roughly seven out of every 10 adults worldwide now have some form of bank account, the World Bank said Thursday, largely due to the proliferation of cell phonebased bank accounts and other simple bank account programs in places like India and SubSaharan Africa.

The finding is a sign of the improved financial well-being of those living in developing countries and particularly women, who increasingly have a safe place to store their savings and are able to participate in the growing digitalization of the global economy.

But women still lag behind men in bank account ownership, the World Bank report said.

An estimated 69 percent of adults had some sort of bank account in 2017, up from about 51 percent in 2011 and 62 percent in 2014. That translates into an additional 515 million adults now having a bank account compared to three years ago.

The figures were released as part of the World Bank’s Global Findex Report, a study on financial inclusion released every three years that involves interviews or surveys of 150,000 people covering 144 countries representing 98 percent of the world’s population.

A chunk of the growth came from India, the world’s second-populous country, where bank account ownership has more than doubled from 40 percent to 80 percent in six years. Since 2014, the Indian government has been pushing a program to sign up individuals for simple, no-fee accounts tied to government biometric identification cards. While usage of those accounts is mixed, the World Bank report was not measuring whether or not a bank account is used, just if an adult had one or not.

Sub-Saharan Africa saw big growth as well, fueled by mobile phone-based accounts. These accounts are tied to a person’s cell phone account instead of a bank, and allow users to transfer money to family or businesses.

World Bank experts expect that mobile money accounts will be the primary way to drive the remaining 1.7 billion people without a bank account into financial services. The bank estimates that 1.1 billion of those 1.7 billion unbanked adults have a mobile phone, and could be more easily brought into the financial system.