Press Release No. 12/320

Press Release No. 12/320
September 19, 2012

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) released today the results of its third annual Financial Access Survey (FAS) through the online FAS database. The FAS is the sole global supply-side source of comparable geographic and demographic data on access to and usage of basic consumer financial services by households and enterprises across the world. The FAS is also the only source of data covering all five categories of the Basic Set of Financial Inclusion Indicators endorsed by the G-20 Leaders at the Los Cabos Summit in June 2012.

The 2012 FAS round was conducted in collaboration with the Access to Finance Advisory Services of the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP). The Netherlands' Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Australian Agency for International Development provided financial support. The data is available to the public free of charge.

The 2012 survey was enhanced to include time series on basic consumer financial access indicators covering credit unions, financial cooperatives and microfinance institutions, and to separately identify small and medium enterprises (SMEs), households, life insurance and non-life insurance. The 2012 round has a response rate of over 93 percent with 182 reporting jurisdictions, of which 27 are first-time reporters. This represents a 35 percent increase in country coverage relative to the 2011 round, which covered 135 reporting jurisdictions.

The FAS database currently contains annual data and metadata for a total of 187 jurisdictions, including all G-20 economies, covering an eight-year period (2004-2011), and totaling more than 40,000 time series. It is available through the IMF eLibrary, facilitating search and use by the public. To foster the use of a common methodology in the survey data, the definitions, types of institutional units, and financial instruments covered in the FAS are broadly consistent with the IMF’s Monetary and Financial Statistics Manual and its accompanying Compilation Guide.