IMF Releases the 2017 Financial Access Survey, Tracking Access to Financial Services
IMF News, October 2, 2017
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- Published: October 2, 2017
Overview
- Press Release No. 17/383
- October 2, 2017
- IMF Communications Department, MEDIA RELATIONS — PRESS OFFICER: Pemba Sherpa; Phone: +1 202 623-7100; Email: MEDIA@IMF.org
- The Financial Access Survey (FAS) is in its eighth annual round and collects annual administrative data on indicators tracking financial access from traditional (e.g., commercial banks or other deposit-taking institutions) and digital (e.g., mobile money) financial service providers.
Key findings on financial access and inclusion
- FAS provides insights on availability and use of financial products such as consumer and firm deposit accounts, loans, and insurance policies across the globe.
- Two Sustainable Development Goals indicators show progress: the number of bank branches and automated teller machines (ATMs), with most growth concentrated in Asia.
- Regional disparities:
- Sub-Saharan Africa has on average five times fewer bank branches and ATMs per adult than the rest of the world.
- Digital financial services expansion:
- Innovations such as mobile money services continue to make inroads.
- In Afghanistan, there are now more than six times as many mobile money agents as ATMs, facilitating direct deposit of payroll for civil servants through their mobile phones.
Gender-disaggregated data and gaps
- Growing demand for more granular data led the FAS to collaborate with national authorities to assess capacity to extract gender-disaggregated financial access statistics from administrative sources.
- Newly available data suggest a financial access gender gap:
- On average, women hold 40 percent of deposit accounts.
- On average, women receive a similar proportion of outstanding loans.
- Country-specific progress examples:
- Malaysia saw its share of female borrowers increase from 37 percent in 2004 to 44 percent in 2016.
- The historical perspective from these data enables policy-relevant research questions, including the causality between loans tailored to women entrepreneurs and the share of female borrowers.
Data availability and support
- The FAS has been conducted since 2009 with financial support from the Netherlands’ Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
- The latest FAS data and country-specific metadata are available free of charge at http://data.imf.org/FAS.
Source: IMF Press Release No. 17/383, October 2, 2017.