NextBillion - A WDI Publication

Over the last decade, financial inclusion has experienced unprecedented progress. According to the 2025 Findex, 79% of adults globally have a financial account compared to 62% 10 years ago. These gains in inclusion deserve recognition, as does the growing understanding of the impact of the financial system on the lives of consumers.

However, access to the financial system is the starting point, not the end goal; rather, we need to ensure that this access enables individuals, households and small businesses to be financially resilient and healthy. Simply adding additional outcomes metrics to the measurement regime won’t deliver the necessary impact people need.

Instead, the financial services ecosystem needs to transform how it approaches product development and delivery. The imperative is to shift from discrete and siloed products and services toward integrated, adaptive solutions that meet multiple needs simultaneously. It’s not just about offering customers a working capital loan, insurance product or savings nudge — it’s about weaving products and services together into a financial services stack, to ensure a more holistic approach to supporting their financial resilience and health.

The growing consumer need for this impact-oriented stack stems from the added complexity of today’s context. The headwinds that people face to their financial resilience and health are different today than they were even four or five years ago. Climate shocks, technological disruptions and economic instability are all accelerating, leaving the most vulnerable with increasing risks and limited financial tools to mitigate them. Compounding this, most financial inclusion initiatives are still organized around verticals (loans, savings, insurance, payments) and delivered through separate providers and channels, which forces the customer to piece them together into a comprehensive safety net or growth path.

The stack of the future must address this lack of integration, with the goal of revolutionizing how we approach financial health. Providers must ensure that their products are designed to work together from the start and evolve with the customer’s life stage and risk profile. They must also evaluate their progress by focusing on financial resilience and health indicators, like the ability to weather shocks, sustain operations and invest in growth.

If the sector can reimagine financial services with the growing headwinds of today’s world in mind, we can help ensure that everyone, everywhere can prosper. Below, I’ll explore three of these headwinds and suggest how the financial services stack of the future can address them.

Headwind 1: Dealing with the Cost-of-Living Crisis

Inflation, supply chain disruptions, climate-related shocks and geopolitical uncertainty have fueled a global cost-of-living crisis, making it more expensive than ever to run a household or a small business.

Underserved households and small businesses don’t have the flexibility to absorb these rising costs, as many adults already need to borrow to buy food and meet their other day-to-day needs. In South Africa, for example, the FinScope South Africa Consumer Survey 2024 showed that 43% of people are borrowing to buy groceries. This issue is not just happening at the household level, or just in emerging markets. In the United Kingdom, according to the Office for National Statistics, in May 2025, 32% of trading businesses were reporting an increase to the cost of the goods and services they buy, compared to the previous month.

To help people manage rising costs and increase their financial resilience and health, a financial services stack could bring together:

• Inventory marketplaces, i.e., platforms where businesses can buy, sell or exchange inventory like raw materials, finished goods or surplus stock, to reduce their exposure to local supply chain disruptions;
• Embedded credit, to help prevent cash flow crunches from becoming business failures, and
• Cost management tools, to help small businesses anticipate and smooth volatility rather than just react to it.

Headwind 2: Weathering Climate Shocks

When extreme weather strikes, households and small businesses lose income, assets and even their ability to work — all of which deepens existing vulnerabilities. Extreme weather events disproportionately impact underserved populations, further exacerbating global patterns of inequality. As the quantity of natural disasters and climate events rises, vulnerable populations will be faced with a myriad of negative impacts, including job losses, health effects, forced displacement and the loss of assets.

A study conducted by the Center for Financial Inclusion on a cohort of 4,000 small businesses across Addis Ababa, Jakarta, Lagos, Delhi and São Paulo found that small business owners are experiencing disruptions in sales, operations and income due to a range of climate shocks, including droughts, extreme heat and floods. The study further found that small businesses are investing in adaptation, but they’re acquiring these funds outside of the formal financial sector — and they’re making these investments in response to, not in preparation of, climate shocks. For workers, climate impacts are just as severe. A study conducted by RISE involving hundreds of workers in garment factories across Cambodia found that 38% of these workers reported income losses due to extreme weather.

To mitigate climate shocks, a financial services stack could integrate parametric insurance with emergency liquidity lines to provide immediate assistance during a climate event, or advice on adaptation paired with energy efficiency loans for longer term sustainability.

The imperative is to help people and businesses become climate resilient. To achieve this, a financial services stack must be adaptive and respond to a diverse set of needs — and it must bring both financial and non-financial services together to deliver multidimensional support.

Headwind 3: Navigating Increasing Cybersecurity threats

As more individuals and small businesses take advantage of the opportunities in the digital economy, they are increasingly faced with the dark side of digital: cyber threats such as scams, ransomware, phishing and fraud. A single cyberattack can wipe out years of economic progress for a small business or household. A March 2025 study conducted by Mastercard of 5,000 small and medium-sized businesses across four continents found that 46% of those surveyed have experienced a cyberattack on their current business, and nearly one in five that suffered an attack then filed for bankruptcy or closed their business.

The situation is even more dire for individuals and households. According to the FBI’s 2024 Internet Crime Report, consumers in the United States lost $16.6 billion to scams and cybercriminals in 2024 — a 33% increase from 2023. The latest data from Findex and additional analysis from CGAP further reinforce this, showing that nearly one in five adults with a phone globally have encountered a scam; in geographies like sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean, the number is nearly 30%. Across all these attacks, populations with less digital fluency, such as the elderly, are at particular risk. And the damage of fraud isn’t limited to just financial loss; these incidents also erode people’s trust in the digital financial system, which will further challenge financial resilience and health.

To protect consumers through financial services, a stack could combine core financial products with embedded cyber protection, digital literacy training and integrated insurance for digital losses. Early pilots and research show that cybersecurity protection works best when included by default into digital products, not as an optional add-on, especially for low-income segments.

Envisioning the Financial Services Stack of the Future

While the risks facing underserved individuals, households and small businesses rise, so too does the opportunity for financial services to mitigate them — and to potentially turn these headwinds into tailwinds. But achieving the right models, designs, distribution channels and impact will require an ecosystem-wide effort. The approach to designing and developing financial services will need to evolve. Instead of taking a vertical lens and looking at isolated products or services, the sector will need to look at these products and services horizontally, developing stacks that combine them to address multiple needs.

While the concept of a financial services stack is emergent, inspiration can come from early innovations that have surfaced across the financial inclusion sector.

To help mitigate cyber risks in Brazil, KOVR is partnering with financial institutions, retailers, micro-merchants and digital platforms to offer “digital life insurance,” which protects against financial losses that occur as a result of cybersecurity incidents. The next step toward a stack could be a small business or personal loan combined with a digital life insurance policy or a cybersecurity assessment offered as part of the lending due diligence process.

Likewise, to help small businesses with climate adaptation, Appalachian Community Capital (ACC) in the United States is experimenting with products that allow small businesses to access loans that cover energy efficiency upgrades. A grace period allows these businesses to achieve energy savings before commencing loan repayment. ACC is also trialling pre-approved loans for disaster recovery based on prior credit assessment, which enables disbursement within 24 hours after a natural disaster (compared to the months these processes may often require). And in India, to supplement the income of women workers on days when it is too hot for them to work, SEWA has combined employment insurance payouts triggered by the temperature level with direct cash assistance programs.

Holistic digital marketplaces may be part of the solution to help small businesses navigate increasing costs. In India, Accion and Bizom are building a digital platform where small businesses can procure inventory from a wider, more competitive market of wholesalers and distributors, which helps mitigate supply chain shortages and price fluctuations. They are also embedding credit into the platform, to improve retailer resilience to unexpected price increases — which enables small businesses to continue to operate when liquidity is tight. Future plans for the platform include leveraging marketplace data to power AI to assist small businesses in making informed decisions during price fluctuations.

For workers, the answer to navigating the growing cost of living may lie in part in earned wage access, a concept that has seen some momentum in the United States and the United Kingdom. This approach allows workers to access a portion of their earned wages before payday, enabling them to manage cashflow issues or address an unanticipated financial shock. Earned wage access could be paired with innovative savings products to help workers build their financial safety net.

The early impact, insight and influence seen in these examples are exciting, but the pace and scale of innovation must accelerate. People’s lives are rarely linear. At times, finance is an enabler, helping someone open a business, invest in education or seize an opportunity. At other times, life brings setbacks like illness, or a climate shock that erases years of hard work. The financial services stack of the future must be built to accompany people through both moments of progress and moments of crisis, ensuring they can recover, rebuild and ultimately thrive.

Together, the financial sector needs to reimagine products and services so that the stack of the future offers an integrated, adaptive set of solutions that meet multiple needs at the same time, with resilience at its core. We must proceed with urgency to reimagine how products and services can be combined to support holistic financial health, so everyone can not only survive but thrive in the digital economy.

Payal Dalal is the Executive Vice President of Global Programs at the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth.

Photo credit: peshkov