Understanding Barriers to Financial Access: Insights from Bank Pricing Data

Kazuko Shirono, Berhe Beyene, Fozan Fareed, Christiaan Loots, Andrea Quevedo and Kameshnee Naidoo

No 2024/150, IMF Working Papers from International Monetary Fund

Abstract: Greater availability of financial access related data in recent years is increasingly enabling policymakers to better track and monitor financial access trends and developments. However, data on barriers to financial access, including costs associated with using financial services—a key factor of financial exclusion—remain scarce. To gain insight into the costs of financial access faced by the low-income segments of population, this paper presents an analysis of a novel dataset on bank pricing containing information on fees and charges associated with various banking services—collected as part of the United Nations Capital Development Fund’s (UNCDF) Making Access Possible (MAP) program—based on a market research approach for 34 low- and middle-income countries in the ASEAN, SADC, and WAEMU regions. The results of our affordability analysis reveal that the costs of maintaining a bank checking account and conducting a few basic transactions can exceed 5 percent of monthly income for consumers in more than 10 percent of the countries in the sample, mainly in the WAEMU and SADC regions. These findings underscore the considerable challenge of affordability as a significant barrier to access to financial services, especially for low-income households and SMEs. The analysis also highlights the need to collect more granular data on the affordability aspect of financial access to facilitate more effective policymaking.

Keywords: Financial access; affordability; bank pricing; financial inclusion; bank pricing datum; small business bank products usage; bank checking account; cost of banking services; banking product; Income; Mobile banking; Small and medium enterprises; Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36
Date: 2024-07-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pay and nep-sea
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.aspx?sk=551370 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:imf:imfwpa:2024/150

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/pubs/ord_info.htm

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IMF Working Papers from International Monetary Fund International Monetary Fund, Washington, DC USA. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Akshay Modi ().