As mobile technology and AI evolve, automation is helping expand financial trust, access and opportunity worldwide.
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For centuries, trust has been the invisible infrastructure of every financial system. Banks, investment firms, insurance companies, regulators and even currencies themselves exist because people collectively believe promises will be kept. Yet today, that foundation is being both challenged and strengthened by artificial intelligence.
In some countries, financial inclusion — the basic idea of having a banking account that makes it easier for people to save and grow their money — is a given. However, as the World Bank Group reports, over 1.4 billion adults globally remain unbanked.
Saving money is not the only challenge for people who lack this basic level of financial inclusion. A lack of banking access can make it harder to receive payments for work, to easily pay bills or to gain access to credit and loan programs. Without financial inclusion, many would-be entrepreneurs, particularly in developing nations, are shut out from critical opportunities.
Why?
This level of financial access signals a certain level of trust and professionalism that is necessary for business owners seeking funding assistance. Fortunately, growing trends in inclusion-focused innovation are helping to remove barriers and expand opportunities by facilitating trust and access.
The proliferation of smartphones has gone a long way in promoting financial inclusion — in fact, the World Bank Group found that 84% of adults in low to medium-income countries owned a mobile phone.
The big reason smartphones are driving financial inclusion? They provide access to financial apps and information that might otherwise remain completely inaccessible.
In an article for Business Insider Africa, Trevor Kuna, Chief of Network Development at QNET, explains, “Women across the world still face systemic barriers to starting and growing a business — from limited access to financing to societal expectations that keep them out of the formal workforce. In many developing regions, women are using mobile technology and online platforms to create income opportunities that did not exist before. Whether in rural Africa or urban Asia, digital entrepreneurship provides a flexible, low-barrier path into business ownership.”
For example, in East Africa, M-Pesa operates a mobile banking service that lets users store and transfer money with mobile phone SIM cards. Users are able to transfer money using SMS messages, expanding access for individuals who might otherwise not have the minimum required deposits for traditional banking.
Mobile-driven systems such as this also improve accessibility for individuals who otherwise live too far from a bank to utilize banking services. The internet already drastically improved financial inclusion, though an increased emphasis on mobile-focused innovations helps lower the barrier even more. Trust is driven not by financial wealth or geographic location, but rather by device access.
Mobile devices and financial apps have gone a long way in innovating financial inclusion, yet challenges remain. A lack of financial literacy and traditional banking’s unwillingness to provide loans to low-income populations have often kept barriers in place.
Quite often, unbanked or underbanked individuals have faced a “chicken and the egg”-type problem when seeking loans to start a business. Banks want to see some type of credit history when issuing a loan. Yet many of these individuals do not have a credit history or even a banking history to refer to. They need to build a banking history, but they are unable to start.
Strategic adoption of AI is poised to change this by automating and improving many of the processes financial institutions use to verify trust.
As an article from CGAP highlights, “Growing digital trails and AI models have started to shift how FSPs conduct credit scoring and credit risk assessment by moving away from historical credit histories, making low-income customers more viable for loans. Specifically, AI algorithms can use alternative data sources, like digital transactions, utility bill payments, inventory purchases, or sale cash flows, to assess creditworthiness, with high-quality loss predictability. For instance, Indian fintechs Fundfina (which offers credit to small shops) and KarmaLife (which provides credit for platform workers) have used credit scoring models based on transactional data and achieved similar predictive power to credit history-based models.”
AI’s automation capabilities are also helping financial institutions reduce authentication and due diligence costs associated with acquiring new customers. These systems can subsequently speed up loan approvals and help financial institutions identify better-tailored solutions for each client.
These types of innovations can significantly enhance trust between financial institutions and individuals. By using AI to automate decision-making and develop standardized procedures that look beyond typical credit scores, institutions can reduce human bias that might otherwise limit banking and loan opportunities.
Similarly, tech innovations that are reducing operational barriers and expanding financial access help lower costs for both financial institutions and their users, creating a true win-win. AI is also increasingly being used to enhance transparency and security, flagging suspicious activity to help put a stop to fraud. Multi-factor authentication, passkeys and other elements further improve security in a way that builds trust between financial institutions and users.
This is not to say that there are not challenges with these advances. AI can still become biased if not given the right framework. Technology access, though dramatically improving, can still be a barrier to many, particularly in developing nations. Leaders must focus on these key challenge areas to further expand financial inclusion and drive further innovation.
Organizations seeking to leverage AI for financial empowerment should begin with five practical priorities:
Algorithms can verify identities, detect fraud, analyze risk and personalize financial guidance with remarkable precision. They can reduce uncertainty, improve consistency and help people make more informed decisions.
Trust ultimately remains a human judgment. AI does not replace trust. It either earns it or erodes it, with every interaction. Efforts focused on promoting financial inclusion are innovative in and of themselves. These technologies and initiatives can have an exponential impact on innovation globally.
By giving more people access to the financial resources they need to pursue entrepreneurship and business ownership, financial inclusion enables future innovations that can reshape communities and industries.
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