For any nation to ensure holistic development of its economy, the most crucial aspect is its rural development. Lately, the developing countries across the globe are focusing on rural development to ensure upliftment of their economies. In ensuring continual development of remote/rural areas and its populaces, central government bodies, local government bodies and the financial institutions play the primary role. While the government authorities are responsible for developing the rural areas with better infrastructure facilities, financial institutions play the role of leveraging support by facilitating financial inclusion to the rural residents.

What is Financial Inclusion?
Financial inclusion is a set of measures put in place to bring all people regardless of their income level into a formal economy. To enable government bodies to reach out to rural vicinities, it is important that every person; however poor, is included in the ecosystem.

In developed/urban spaces, banks reach customers by opening multiple branches and ATMs. However, the reason behind the inability to reach out to rural customers is that opening a bank branch in rural/emerging markets requires high CapEx/OpEx and the branch fails to generate enough ROI. Further on, it is difficult for rural customers to operate a banking application and gain access to banking services on a mobile phone. This leaves a big chunk of population unbanked.

Need for Financial Inclusion in an Economy
According to a report by the World Bank, nearly 1.7 billion adults in the world continue to remain unbanked.