Financial Inclusion in South Asia
South Asia has seen substantial gains in financial inclusion over the past ten years. According to the latest edition of the Global Findex Database 2025, 78% of adults in the region now report having an account at a financial institution, up from 46% in 2014. This high level of account ownership is largely thanks to the size of India, the world’s most populous country, where 89% of adults have a financial account. Only four other countries are included in the Global Findex 2025 for South Asia: Bangladesh (43% account ownership), Nepal (60%), Pakistan (27%) and Sri Lanka (82%). South Asia is currently the region with the second highest level of account ownership (tied with Europe and Central Asia) after East Asia and Pacific, for low- and middle-income economies.
While digital payment usage in South Asia has more than doubled in the past decade, usage remains low compared with other regions. In India, only 48% of adults report having made or received digital payments, the highest rate in the region, followed closely by Sri Lanka at 47%, while this number is much lower in Nepal (28%) and Pakistan (24%).
Gender gap in financial inclusion
In South Asia, women are 5 percentage points less likely than men to own accounts. This account ownership gender gap is the second lowest in the world among low- and middle-income countries. However, this number hides significant variation among countries. While India, Nepal and Sri Lanka have negligible gender gaps between 1 and 3 percentage points, Pakistan and Bangladesh represent the other extreme, with substantial gaps of about 30 and 20 percentage points, respectively.
For digital payments, the regional gender gap is much wider than for account ownership, with women account owners in South Asia about 15 percentage points less likely to make or receive digital payments than men. While most countries in the region hover between 11 and 14 percentage points, Pakistan is again the exception with a gender gap in digital payments of 31 percentage points.
For Pakistan and Bangladesh, closing the gender gap remains an important priority, as research shows that when women have access to and use financial services, they gain greater control over both household and individual financial resources and have more opportunities to access better jobs. To learn more about how the financial inclusion sector is working towards women’s economic empowerment, join FinEquity, a community of practice to empower women through financial inclusion, convened by CGAP.
Resilience
One in four adults (26%) in South Asia have experienced a natural disaster or extreme weather event, reflecting the region’s high exposure to floods, cyclones and monsoon variability, and 16% report loss of income or property damage as a result. While account ownership has grown substantially in the region, household resilience to these events remains low. When asked how long they could cover expenses after losing their main income source, most adults (about 61%) could cover just a month or less. Only 21% said they could cover expenses for more than two months, the lowest rate among other world regions for low- and middle-income countries.
This combination of higher disaster exposure and lower financial resilience leaves large shares of the region’s population financially fragile. There is a strong need to develop a range of financial services that meet people’s needs, including products that encourage people to save and greater access to social safety nets. To explore the link between access to financial services and climate resilience, refer to CGAP’s Impact Pathfinder, which synthesizes decades of research on this topic.