Publication date:
Oct 29, 2025
IMF Data Brief: Financial Access Survey
Datasets:
Fintech Expands Financial Services Access, Fast Outpacing Traditional Banking
Financial Access Survey, Annual Country Data
Contributors: Fozan Fareed, Katia Huayta, Dinh Nguyen-Xuan, Miguel Segoviano, Alexander Tromp, Huong Lan Vu
Digital financial services, including mobile money and mobile and internet banking, are transforming how people access financial services. The 2025 FAS Annual Report—with the accompanying full dataset for 163 countries—reveals the scale and pace of this transformation. The FAS team is expanding data coverage to include digital financial services such as e-money, e-wallets, fintech and peer-to-peer lending, crowdfunding, neobanks, and mobile money-enabled products, to be released at a later stage.
This trend is particularly clear in Emerging Market and Developing Economies (EMDEs), where digital transactions more than quadrupled between 2017 and 2024 with digital adoption accelerating sharply after 2020, as the pandemic drove behavioral shifts across regions (Figure 1).
The shift is most dramatic in Sub-Saharan Africa: between 2018 and 2024, the region added 100 mobile money accounts for every 50 additional deposit accounts per 100 adults. Mobile money has become the dominant form of financial access, outnumbering traditional deposit accounts by more than two to one (Figure 2).
Notes: The regional weighted averages are calculated using only the economies with available data for the respective periods. Mobile money is a digital medium of exchange and store of value using mobile money accounts, facilitated by a network of mobile money agents. A bank account is not required to use mobile services. Most Advanced Economies do not report mobile money data because the service does not exist. Mobile and internet banking is the use of an application on a mobile or another electronic device to execute banking services.
FAS data also reveal a positive relationship between financial literacy and the adoption of digital financial services across countries, for both Advanced Economies and EMDEs (Figure 3).
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