Last year, investments in financial technology, or fintech, hit an all-time high. But while entrepreneurs and investors tend to focus on products and services to promote financial inclusion in emerging markets, investments in the ecosystems those innovations need to succeed risk being overlooked.
Here are some of the gaps that remain to ensure that rapid advances in mobile communications and digital payments realize their potential social impact and reach the 2.5 billion people who lack access to formal financial services.
“We need to think about access as we think about financial services,” Kurtis Heimerl, whose community cellular networks company Endaga was acquired by Facebook, said at a recent event on financial technology for global development hosted by the Center for Effective Global Action at Google in San Francisco.