Nine out of ten fintech executives in Asia-Pacific affirm that social good guides their strategy. Fintech services can remain unevenly accessible depending on geographic zones. The gap between this claim and ground reality is neither an accident nor a misunderstanding: it stems from a structural tension between what markets monetize and what inclusion truly requires. Bangladesh has found an answer—imperfect but measurable.
The essentials
- According to the Money20/20 Asia 2025 survey, 90.6% of fintech leaders claim to integrate social good into their strategy, yet effective inclusion remains unequal across zones and income profiles (Money20/20 Asia 2025).
- In Bangladesh, direct public support accompanied the rollout of Nagad via the public postal network, while bKash presented itself as a private company regulated by Bangladesh Bank; the latter publishes sector statistics on MFS accounts, with over 55% opened in rural zones as of December 2023.
- Without regulatory constraint or public support, fintech providers optimize toward customers with low acquisition costs and high transaction volumes—a profile that poor rural dwellers do not match.
- The gap between declared inclusion and measured inclusion ranks among the key policy issues of the next fintech decade in Asia.
The gap between what you declare and what you deliver
This mechanism of structural exclusion self-reinforces: the more a provider concentrates resources on profitable segments, the less it develops the operational knowledge needed to serve other user profiles. The gap between declared intention and measured result is therefore not simply a matter of priorities, but of progressive atrophy in the capacity to design products suited to uses radically different from those generating most revenue.
The Money20/20 Asia 2025 survey questioned hundreds of sector executives across the region. 90.6% affirm that their company integrates social good into its strategy. The figure is striking. It becomes even more so when cross-referenced with data on actual inclusion.
ASEAN financial cooperation structures identify inclusion challenges: rural populations, informal economy workers, and unbanked women remain confronted with barriers to accessing fintech services. According to OJK-BPS 2025, formal financial inclusion stands at 83.61% in urban areas and 75.70% in rural areas using the continuity method.
Similar disparities are documented in several Asia-Pacific countries.
The problem is economic before it is moral. A fintech provider calculates acquisition cost per customer, processing cost per transaction, and monthly volume each user generates. A formally employed urban worker, paid by bank transfer, who settles bills and saves online, generates more predictable transaction volumes. A subsistence farmer three hours’ drive from a city, with no fixed address, seasonal transactions, and small amounts, rarely does. In the absence of external constraint, companies tend to favor profitable segments.
Not out of malice: by market logic.
The Bangladesh case: what subsidy changes
Bangladesh presents a documented case of an alternative. bKash, founded in 2011 by BRAC Bank and Money in Motion LLC, with the Gates Foundation joining as investor later, and Nagad, an operator backed by the Bangladeshi government, established mobile payment services. Financing structures and regulatory terms influence the geographic scope of rollout.
Direct public support enabled Nagad to deploy offerings in rural zones. Bangladesh Bank publishes sector statistics on MFS accounts, documenting strong rural presence with over 55% of accounts opened in rural zones as of December 2023. It is one of Asia’s highest rates for this population category.
This figure demands careful reading. Access to a mobile payment service and full financial inclusion are two different realities. The large rural share of MFS accounts alone does not measure rural access to credit, insurance, or interest-bearing savings. But the first step—the ability to send and receive money without informal intermediaries—alters transfer conditions. Remittances to rural families cost less. Payments to small suppliers occur without travel. Vulnerability to cash-flow shocks diminishes.
Bangladesh shows strong rural presence of MFS accounts, though the 55% figure for rural accounts alone does not prove that fintech actually reaches the poorest rural populations. Obstacles are simultaneously economic, regulatory, social, and technological or infrastructural.
Markets alone won’t get there
To understand why the rest of Asia-Pacific lags in this area, one must look at how fintech companies finance and value themselves.
Venture capital orients funding toward urban and higher-income segments, with fewer resources available for rural zones. This is venture capital’s own logic.
Fintech leaders who declare integration of social good are not necessarily lying. Many believe in it. But believing in inclusion and delivering it within a pure private financing framework are two different exercises. Cross-subsidies, universal service obligations, and public support can favor inclusion of poor rural populations.
The World Bank Findex documents this mechanism globally. Some countries that progressed in rural financial inclusion combined mobile technology with deliberate public policies, notably digitized social transfers, rural coverage requirements, and public-private partnerships. India with the UPI system and state payments, Kenya with M-Pesa initially supported by a philanthropic foundation, Bangladesh: the exceptions confirm the mechanism.
Inequalities in access to fintech services persist, notably for rural populations.
Intent statements do not replace results obligations
The proliferation of ESG commitments and inclusion charters in fintech companies creates a documented risk: substituting assertion for measurement. Saying you integrate social good into your strategy is one thing. Producing data on the number of new rural users, their usage frequency, their transaction volume, and impact on their income is another.
This lack of measurement is not trivial. It allows sincerely committed actors and those using inclusion as a commercial argument to appear in the same statistic. When 90.6% of fintech executives declare integration of social good, the data says nothing about what that integration produces. A 35%-interest-rate urban microcredit program for online merchants can fall into the same category as a subsidized rural payment system for unbanked farmers.
Studies show that certain fintech programs labeled “inclusive” in Southeast Asia primarily served integration of small semi-formal urban merchants into data collection systems, with limited credit access improvements. Inclusion was real at the margin; value extraction was more so.
The same dynamic applies to other technologies presented as emancipatory. Regulating before adopting increasingly costs more: the issue consists of defining impact metrics before deployment, not after.
The actors changing the calculation
A few regulators and institutions have begun modifying the rules of the game.
The Philippine Central Bank clarified in 2023 the procedures for submitting reports relative to a quarterly reporting obligation on the agriculture-fishery-agrarian reform quota established in 2022 for providers exceeding a certain customer threshold. The effect is modest but documented: several operators launched pilot programs in provinces to meet these requirements.
The World Bank and the Alliance for Financial Inclusion support programs offering public guarantees on portfolio losses in selected rural markets in Southeast Asia. The principle is that the state covers part of default risk to encourage private operator engagement. The effectiveness of these mechanisms depends on guarantee calibration and monitoring quality.
Certain philanthropic foundations, the Gates Foundation foremost, but also Omidyar Network, have financed rural fintech deployments in South and Southeast Asia with patient capital structures—accepting ten- to fifteen-year return horizons instead of five to seven. bKash is the most cited case. These mechanisms exist. They remain marginal in volume relative to commercial venture capital flows.
The question of who captures fintech gains connects to broader reflection on wealth inequality and access to financial tools, a subject the book review devoted to “The Future” by Stiglitz and co-authors addresses directly within developing economies’ framework.
The Bangladesh model, still unprecedented in export
The distinction between access and actual use is equally determinant for evaluating model sustainability. A mobile wallet opened but little used generates maintenance costs without producing behavioral data that would allow service refinement and justify additional investment. Depth of use is as important as breadth of initial coverage for assessing rural inclusion sustainability.
The Bangladesh model has limitations its promoters acknowledge.
Public support for Nagad unfolded within a context of digitizing government social transfers. This conjunction is difficult to reproduce without a state program of this scale. Countries lacking a social transfer system to digitize lack the same lever.
Inclusion quality also warrants monitoring. Having an active mobile wallet does not mean accessing credit at decent terms, nor protecting against abusive practices. Several ongoing studies examine whether rural Bangladeshi populations adopting bKash or Nagad improved net savings capacity or primarily substituted an expensive informal transfer channel with a less costly formal one. Both scenarios represent progress; they are not equivalent.
The risk of overestimating the Bangladesh model exists. But the inverse risk, underestimating what the model demonstrates regarding technical feasibility of rural inclusion, is equally important.
Asian fintech has the technical capacity to reach rural zones. Bangladesh demonstrates this technical feasibility, particularly through strong rural presence of MFS accounts, though depth of inclusion for the poorest rural populations remains to be documented. Financing architecture and regulation strongly influence rural reach, among other factors like infrastructure, incomes, and digital skills. Sector leaders have understood the need to discuss inclusion; regulators who impose measurement of results can influence operator priorities. How many Asian governments will make this choice over the next five years?
Sources
- Rich Turrin, Southeast Asia Fintech: A Primary Source (Substack), Money20/20 APAC Fintech Survey 2026 synthesis and APAC inclusion data
- Bangladesh Bank, Annual Report on Financial Inclusion 2026 (Bangladesh Bank, Dhaka)
- World Bank Global Findex Database 2021-2024, World Bank
- ASEAN Financial Inclusion Database, ASEAN Secretariat
- OJK (Otoritas Jasa Keuangan), Indonesia Financial Inclusion Report 2025
- IFPRI, studies on the impact of fintech programs in Southeast Asia (International Food Policy Research Institute)
