More people have a bank account today than at any point on record. The World Bank’s Global Findex Database 2025 puts global account ownership at 79 percent of adults, up from just 51 percent in 2011. That is genuine progress, driven almost entirely by mobile technology reaching people that branch networks never did.
But the same report has a harder number sitting next to the good news: 1.3 billion adults are still outside the formal financial system entirely. In Latin America and the Caribbean specifically, mobile money adoption jumped from 22 percent of adults to 37 percent between 2021 and 2024, a striking three-year gain, and also a reminder of how much distance is still left to cover. Trust remains the biggest single obstacle. Research from CGAP based on the same Findex data found that nearly one in three unbanked adults in the region distrust financial institutions outright.
That gap is not just a banking statistic. The UN Capital Development Fund identifies financial inclusion as a named target within eight of the seventeen UN Sustainable Development Goals, including poverty reduction, gender equality, decent work, and reduced inequality. Access to a bank account is one of the more direct levers available for improving how resilient a household or a small business is to a bad month, a medical bill, or a lost job. It belongs in a sustainability conversation because it functions as one.
Why the Gap Persists Even as Technology Improves
The remaining gap is not mainly a hardware problem. Findex data shows that roughly 900 million of the world’s unbanked adults already own a mobile phone. The infrastructure to reach them exists in their pocket. What is missing is a version of banking built for people who do not have a conventional credit history, cannot easily reach a branch, or have specific, practical reasons not to trust a financial institution yet.
Traditional branch-based banking was never built to solve that problem cheaply. A physical branch has to justify its cost with deposit volume, which pushes institutions toward serving customers who already have money, and away from exactly the populations that most need a foothold in the formal financial system. Digital-first infrastructure changes that math. Once a mobile banking layer exists, the marginal cost of reaching one more customer starts to look like the cost of an app download, not the cost of another branch lease.
That shift is where a bank’s technology partner starts to matter as much as its strategy. Two real projects from Computools, an IT consulting and software development firm with a dedicated financial services practice, show what that shift looks like when it is aimed specifically at underserved segments rather than treated as a generic app refresh.
A Regional Bank Rebuilds Around a Segment It Was Losing
One of Computools’ clients is the largest regionally listed financial institution in its Caribbean market, operating across 17 countries with more than 500,000 clients and roughly $13 billion in assets. It is a long-established institution, not a startup, and it was running into a problem familiar to regional banks worldwide: its digital banking experience worked fine for existing account holders but was steadily losing younger customers to nimbler digital-first competitors.
Computools rebuilt the bank’s web and mobile banking experience and integrated it with Visa’s card-processing infrastructure using a microservices architecture. The features that came out of that work were specifically aimed at building trust with newer and younger account holders rather than simply modernizing the interface: spending limits, temporary card blocking, parental approval workflows, and real-time transaction validation while a cardholder is traveling abroad.
Those are not cosmetic features. For a first-time account holder, or for a household extending financial access to a teenager or young adult for the first time, a spending cap and an instant lock button function as guardrails that make a real account feel safe enough to use instead of falling back on cash. The result, per the bank’s own reporting, was a 12 percent increase in market share among 18-to-30-year-old customers, a segment that in many regional Caribbean banking markets is disproportionately unbanked or underbanked precisely because it lacks the credit history or institutional trust that older customers built up over decades.
A Second Kind of Inclusion Story: Making New Entrants Possible at All
Not every inclusion gain comes from an incumbent bank retrofitting itself. Some of it comes from making it possible for new, focused financial institutions to exist in the first place. Computools’ work with Moblet, a US-based challenger bank that had no in-house engineering team, is a different version of the same underlying story.
Computools built Moblet a cross-platform mobile banking application using Flutter, with a Java and Spring Framework backend, along with biometric authentication, a streamlined KYC onboarding flow, and integrations with SWIFT, Visa, and Mastercard. None of that is unusual as a technical scope. What matters for the inclusion angle is what it replaced: without an outsourced partner capable of handling both the engineering and the compliance load, a challenger bank without its own development team typically does not launch at all.
That has a direct bearing on who ends up serving underbanked customers. If the only institutions capable of building compliant digital banking products are the ones that already have large internal engineering departments, the field narrows to incumbents who, by definition, are not usually the ones targeting newly banked, younger, or thinner-margin customers. Lowering the technical barrier to launching a compliant banking product is itself a form of expanding access, one step removed from the end customer.
What Actually Closes the Remaining Gap
The Findex data is fairly specific about why the last stretch of unbanked adults remains unbanked: lack of money, distance from a financial institution, missing documentation, and distrust show up consistently across regions as the leading barriers, not lack of a phone or lack of internet access. The documentation piece doesn’t disappear the moment a bank goes digital-first, either. In markets with lower digital-ID penetration, proof-of-address paperwork and signed account-opening forms still often arrive as physical mail, and how quickly that intake gets logged and verified affects how quickly a new account actually gets approved. Institutions serious about closing that specific gap increasingly run dedicated mailroom management software alongside their digital banking stack, so a scanned ID or a paper form gets tracked and fed into the same KYC pipeline as a digital upload instead of sitting in an unsorted inbox for days. That means the design choices inside a banking product matter as much as the technology stack underneath it. A KYC flow has to work for people without conventional paperwork. Fee structures have to make sense on a low balance. Trust has to be built incrementally, the way spending caps and instant card locks did in the Caribbean Bank project, rather than assumed on day one.
For a financial institution evaluating a modernization partner with inclusion as an actual goal rather than a talking point, that suggests a narrower question than the usual vendor checklist. It is not only whether a firm understands PCI DSS, KYC, or AML requirements, though that baseline still matters. It is whether the firm has a track record of turning access barriers into specific product decisions, the way parental controls and transaction validation did for one bank’s youngest customers, or a workable KYC flow did for a challenger bank with no engineering department of its own.
The Bigger Picture
Financial inclusion does not close in a single product launch. It closes through a long sequence of institutions deciding that an underserved segment is worth designing for, and then finding an engineering partner capable of executing on that intent rather than defaulting to a generic build. The Caribbean bank’s 12 percent gain among 18-to-30-year-olds and Moblet’s ability to launch at all are both, in their own way, small pieces of the 1.3 billion-person gap the Findex data describes. Neither closes it alone. Both are the kind of concrete, measurable progress that the UN’s inclusion-linked development goals are actually asking for, and a reasonable indication of where the rest of the industry is likely headed next.
