The Global Findex Database 2025: Connectivity and Financial Inclusion in the Digital Economy is a World Bank report by Leora Klapper, Dorothe Singer, Laura Starita, and Alexandra Norris.
Summary: This is the fifth edition of the Global Findex, the world’s largest dataset on how adults access and use financial services. This edition adds new data on mobile phone ownership and internet use. The headline finding: 79% of adults worldwide now have a financial account (up from 74% in 2021), driven largely by mobile money and digitally-enabled accounts, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. Still, 1.3 billion adults remain without an account, and gaps persist by gender, income, and region.
Big Idea: Financial inclusion is increasingly a byproduct of digital connectivity, having a mobile phone (86% of adults do) frequently comes first and makes account ownership possible, not the other way around
Playable Takeaway: The idea of being “one step away” from financial access (having a phone and ID but no account) could work well as a game mechanic, a character who’s almost there, blocked not by missing tools, but by something harder to fix, like affording the fees or trusting the system enough to open an account.