Africa’s financial inclusion story has made progress, but the numbers reveal a stubborn gap. Eighteen years after the IMF identified inclusion as part of South Africa’s broader transformation agenda, account ownership across sub-Saharan Africa has risen from 49% in 2021 to 58% in 2025, according to the World Bank’s Global Findex.
Source: Supplied. Christopher Ball, co-founder of Finch Technologies.
Yet the region still ranks among the lowest globally for account ownership. As technology reshapes how consumers access and use financial services, the next challenge is no longer simply opening accounts – but making inclusion meaningful.
In contrast, GSMA data shows that registered mobile money accounts hit 2.3 billion globally in 2025, with 1.2 billion of those in Africa. Again, it’s a good-news story, but it comes with a hard dose of reality: more than 1.7 billion of those global accounts are sitting idle, and 25.7% of accounts are active monthly (meaning that more than seven in 10 registered accounts are essentially dormant).
“If we look at our data alone, financial inclusion in Africa remains a very achievable end goal. More consumers are opening bank accounts and
transacting digitally than they were a year ago, pointing to a clear behavioural shift away from cash and towards digital products for managing, saving and transferring money,” says Christopher Ball, co-founder of Finch Technologies.
Ball points to four structural shifts that will define Africa’s financial future, shaping the market in the next couple of years.
1. Your smartphone data becomes your credit score: Your smartphone is creating a financial footprint that extends far beyond mobile payments. With more than 1.1 billion registered mobile money accounts in sub- Saharan Africa in 2025, according to GSMA, wallets increasingly reveal how consumers receive, move and spend money.
Alongside this, telecommunications data, from airtime and data purchases to monthly contract payments and recharge patterns, provides a separate set of behavioural signals. “Over the next five years, creditworthiness will increasingly be informed by the digital behaviours consumers already generate every day,” says Ball. “How consistently you pay for your mobile contract, buy data or airtime, or use a digital wallet could become another signal of financial behaviour, particularly where traditional credit data is limited.”
2. AI succeeds where banks can’t keep up: Every quarter, South Africa's formal credit industry receives around 13 million applications, and declines roughly 8 million of them, according to National Credit Regulator data. AI-driven behavioural scoring is the industry's best bet on closing that gap. Local fintechs are building proprietary scoring engines that banks will adopt rather than build in-house, while the banks embed these models directly into their apps to reach millions who are still locked out of credit.
Retailers are becoming access points too, powering BNPL origination and physical sign-up kiosks. The trend for the next few years is clear: static scoring is giving way to adaptive algorithms that process real-time data, refining pricing, catching fraud in milliseconds, and enabling hyper-personalised products that are built around how people actually spend and earn.
3. The rise of embedded financial services: Africa's embedded finance market is on track to hit $13.2bn in 2026, following a 15.7% CAGR between 2021 and 2025. That’s a clear sign that the ‘bank as gatekeeper’ model is already being unbundled. And the stakes are real: in Nigeria, less than 6% of the adult population accesses regulated credit despite high demand, meaning that when a logistics app, retailer or e-commerce platform embeds lending into its experience, it can create an entirely new entry point to formal credit.
We’re already seeing the beginnings of this shift, with retailers and other non-bank platforms offering payments, credit and other financial products directly to their customers. For fintechs, this will create a very different type of ‘banking’ ecosystem.
Rather than financial data sitting primarily with a consumer’s bank, technology will make it possible to interpret a much broader picture of their financial behaviour and use those insights to support affordability and risk assessments when they apply for products across different credit providers. The bank of the future may not disappear - it may simply look very different from what we call a bank today.
4. Risk is determined by behaviour, not just history: Nearly 90% of employment in sub-Saharan Africa is informal, per the ILO – which is exactly why credit history has failed as a filter. Even in the region's most advanced markets, more than half of all borrowing still runs through informal channels, a 2026 BCG report found.
The behavioural data to fix this already exists at enormous scale, and very little of it is currently used to assess creditworthiness, but that’s changing. Lenders are moving from judging consumers by past loans to reading real-time signals, like transaction velocity, spending discipline, savings habits, income reliability.
A gig worker with no bureau record but steady balances and on-time bill payments can now qualify for credit that history-based scoring would have denied outright.
Financial inclusion is a long and winding road. Banks and fintechs have become good at creating access, but less successful at sustaining participation. Dormant wallets, underused accounts and continued reliance on cash show that availability alone doesn’t drive adoption.
The next five years will require greater focus on affordability, trust, user experience and financial literacy.
So, is financial inclusion still an achievable goal? Absolutely – but the definition of inclusion needs to evolve. Opening a bank account isn’t the finish line. The real measure of progress is whether people can meaningfully use financial services to manage, save, borrow and build greater financial resilience.
Technology will play a critical role, but it can’t do it alone. Policy needs to evolve, infrastructure needs to support a more connected ecosystem, and banks, fintechs and regulators need more open conversations about what meaningful inclusion really requires. We’ve solved part of the equation by expanding access. The next challenge is making sure the financial system actually works for the people we’ve bought into it.
