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Today, the basic resources and systems people need to achieve economic prosperity, like quality education and affordable housing and financial services, are not accessible to all that seek them out.
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This means billions of people around the world are left struggling to meet basic needs.
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Our economy, which has so much wealth in it and has so much, um, dynamism to it, needs to be restructured and reorganized so that people, all people, can create the lives they seek.
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Financial systems are critical infrastructure in economies, when people have access to safe and affordable financial services, they can make payments, save money for the future, and take advantage of loans, and that opens doors to entrepreneurship and economic participation.
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While access to financial services has been on the rise over the past decade, 1.4 billion people around the world are still unbanked, meaning they don't have an account at a formal financial institution.
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Women make up 55% of the world's unbanked adults.
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They're living in a cash world, if we can bring them in and help them benefit from the digital economy, and then with data and data analytics, we can really match the right financial tools that will really improve their lives a lot.
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Access to bank accounts is a place to start, designing products and services for inclusion can ensure people and small businesses are able to use financial services to improve their financial health and build wealth over time.
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For example, Accion and the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth have partnered with financial service providers to connect more than 5 million micro and small business owners to new digital tools, allowing them to save, make payments, and access capital.
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Many governments around the world have established national financial inclusion initiatives to try to address the structural barriers that exclude certain groups from the formal financial system.
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Some countries, like India, have made real progress, India's experience indicates really how quickly things can, can change, in a period of eight years, we've gone from 35% to 80% of adults having bank accounts.
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Between 2011 and 2017, savings in financial institutions increased from 12 to 20%, and credit and debit card ownership quadrupled from 9 to 34%.
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But some segments of the population are still lagging behind, such as women, those with primary education or less, and people living in rural areas.
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In the biggest economy in the world, the United States, financial systems are more accessible than ever, yet they remain inequitable and inefficient, in the US, only 30% of people actually are financially healthy.
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That means 176 million Americans basically are vulnerable.
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For example, black and Hispanic households are more likely to turn to high cost financial services, such as payday lenders and check cashers, due to a lack of access to affordable financial services.
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If the African-Americans were fully banked like everyone else, that would be another one to one and a half trillion dollars of GDP.
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A number of organizations, including the Aspen Institute and its partners, are now calling for a national coordinated financial inclusion strategy for the United States.
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This is an issue that crosses partisan lines, crosses economic lines, um, crosses sectors, we have um organizations ranging from big private sector companies all the way through to nonprofit organizations coming together to realize that in order to create um an inclusive financial system, the one that we all believe in, um, we have to have a national financial inclusion strategy.
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Financial inclusion is essential to build strong, inclusive economies, if we can make the systemic changes needed to turn the idea of an inclusive economy into a reality, we'll begin to see real, meaningful change in people's lives.
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To find out more about how financial inclusion is helping to build stronger and more inclusive economies around the world, visit Aspeninstitute.org/apie.
