· 6 min read
Nearly two billion people remain outside the formal financial system. They can’t open a bank account, receive digital payments, or access affordable credit, the very basics that enable people to earn, save, and plan. For decades, the push for financial inclusion meant offering those services to the poor. But as climate shocks, inflation, and conflict reshape economies, inclusion is no longer just a development goal. It’s becoming a resilience strategy, one grounded not only in technology or capital, but in trust.
“The challenge isn’t only to extend access,” Peter Zetterli, climate lead at CGAP told me. “It’s to build systems that are reliable when they’re most needed. That reliability is what turns access into resilience.”
Why the system still locks people out
The global financial system was built for connected markets, not for disconnected lives. Even as digital banking expands, many people remain excluded because the infrastructure that supports finance, identity systems, payment rails, and credit data, simply doesn’t reach them.
Access gaps aren’t just technical. They reflect the biases baked into the financial system itself, how risk is defined, whose data counts, and who gets to participate. Investing in developing economies is typically seen as high risk, but IFC research on 30 years of loans to companies in those countries shows performance rates similar to advanced economies. The same is true on a micro scale: lending to smallholder farmers or informal businesses is often perceived as risky, even though repayment rates actually tend to be very high.
As a result, their access to financing is curtailed, which makes them less likely to succeed and less resilient. The real risk lies in a financial system that mistrusts its most consistent borrowers.
Meeting people where they are
Tim Strong, head of agriculture finance at Opportunity International, has spent years working to close that gap for smallholder farmers across Africa. What his team learned was simple: new technology isn’t always what people need most. “If you want to reach people who are traditionally excluded, you have to go where they already are,” Strong told me. “For most of our clients, that’s WhatsApp, not a new app.”
When the organization began using WhatsApp to deliver agronomy training and manage lending relationships, adoption soared. The logic was practical, a low-bandwidth tool people already trusted. A chatbot running on familiar software, but powered by AI and agricultural data, became a financial lifeline.
“The main constraint to lending to the poor is the cost of gathering information about them,” Strong explains. “If you can use tools people already know and trust, you cut those costs dramatically.”
Each conversation generated data, crop yields, repayment habits, questions about pricing, building a picture of reliability that traditional banking systems never captured. Over time, those small digital interactions became proof points of trust.
“Every message, every payment, every harvest cycle is a chance to prove that the system works,” Strong says. “Trust takes time, especially when people have been let down before.”
Redefining risk and accountability
That dynamic, of trust built transaction by transaction, has bigger implications for global finance. During the pandemic, it became evident that smallholder producers who once seemed marginal were actually central to food security. When supply chains fractured, it was local farmers and traders who kept markets functioning. What was once seen as high risk suddenly became essential infrastructure.
This reliability dividend, the cumulative benefit of trust, transparency, and predictability, can be measured. Lower default rates reduce lending costs. Faster payments improve cash flow for micro-enterprises. Clear communication through familiar channels reduces dropout and fraud. Each of these effects adds resilience to the broader economy, compounding into what might be called the trust dividend.
That also raises a harder question of accountability. The way risk is priced often reflects the assumptions of the financial system more than the behavior of its clients. Recognizing and correcting that bias isn’t just about fairness; it’s about making global finance work efficiently.
From access to agency
Technology itself can’t guarantee trust. What matters is whether people feel that the systems around them are designed to help them act, to plan, invest, and recover when things go wrong.
“When floods hit or crops fail, access to finance often determines whether people recover or fall deeper into poverty,” Zetterli notes. “Being able to invest in resilience ahead of time and to reliably access money in a crisis can make the difference between a household that copes successfully versus one that gets stuck in an endless poverty trap.”
That principle holds true for digital identity and payments as well. As Chris Lawrence, chief of programmes at the Interledger Foundation, explained to me, “When people lose their homes or their documents, they shouldn’t also lose access to their money.” Portability and openness, whether in data, identity, or payments, make financial systems more human, not less. They give people continuity in times of disruption.
Strong sees that same logic in rural finance. “Smallholder farmers aren’t just clients,” he says. “They’re the backbone of food security. If we want resilient food systems, we have to build resilient financial systems around them.”
That resilience starts with agency: giving people the ability to participate on their own terms. When finance works through channels people trust and understand, it becomes less about access and more about empowerment.
The Trust Dividend
What unites these examples, from WhatsApp banking to digital IDs, is the idea that resilience grows from reliability. Each successful transaction strengthens the expectation that systems will hold when stress comes again.
“Lending more to clients after a shock is counterintuitive to most banks”, says Zetterli, “but if done right, it can be a clear win-win for them and their clients”. Microfinance institutions like VisionFund have shown that recovery lending can not just help clients get back on their feet faster, but improve repayment rates and financial performance. Being seen as dependable in a crisis can also earn the lender strong loyalty from clients and attract new customers.
It’s the same logic that underpins any network: reliability creates participation, participation builds data, data reinforces confidence. Over time, that feedback loop becomes a form of social capital, one that can be measured in lower costs, higher repayment rates, and stronger communities.
The global challenge is scaling that trust without losing its human texture. That means building standards and safeguards that make inclusion safe to scale, exactly the work happening in parallel through open-source security and interoperability projects. But on the ground, it still begins with a relationship: a loan officer, a message thread, a promise kept.
Financial inclusion began as a development project. It has become a systems challenge and, increasingly, a question of collective reliability. As the world faces overlapping crises of climate, debt, and digital disruption, the real test of finance will be whether it can carry trust, dignity and agency as reliably as it carries money.
illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability & Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.
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