What is the biggest story in financial inclusion in 2026? We at e-MFP recently published the “Financial Inclusion Compass 2026,” a mixed-methods survey of sector trends, perceptions, risks and priorities that we’ve published regularly since 2018, and the results reveal a few plausible answers to this question.
Climate adaptation is still the highest-ranked trend. Artificial intelligence (AI), something respondents greeted largely with indifference only two years ago, has risen to second place as a trend, and the risks of AI and data misuse are now seen as an immensely important challenge. Changing capital flows are another challenge that’s firmly on the agenda, as public and donor funding becomes less predictable. And respondents continue to worry about the difficulty of sustainably reaching populations that remain excluded.
But looking at these trend and challenge rankings alone (while important and interesting) risks missing the full picture. The clearest signals from the 2026 Compass come from looking at these issues in the aggregate, examining how they intersect. As this year’s (and previous years’) survey responses have illustrated, many in the sector are raising their ambitions for what financial inclusion has to achieve, at the same time as the environment in which they operate is becoming more difficult. This means harder and harder choices ahead. Let’s get into a few of them.
Raising Expectations Beyond Financial Access
First, access is clearly no longer enough. For much of the modern history of financial inclusion, access provided a relatively clear organising objective. Too many people (so the narrative went) were excluded from formal financial services. Progress meant reaching more of them with accounts, payments, credit and other products. Indeed, the World Bank’s Global Findex survey — a key source of data for the sector — continues to frame inclusion primarily in terms of access.
Of course, access is necessary, but it’s not sufficient. And there remains work to do. But the responses to the Compass show a sector — especially those that fund it — increasingly applying a more demanding test of success.
A household can have a bank or mobile money account and still be unable to cope with a health emergency. A small business can have credit and still be devastated by a flood or prolonged income shock. A farmer can be financially included on paper, while remaining one failed harvest away from distress.
This helps explain why household resilience to shocks is now one of the leading future priorities in the Compass, and why resilience also appears so prominently in respondents’ descriptions of current trends. Many respondents are looking beyond whether people can access financial services, and towards what those services actually enable them to do — and whether their financial health or wellbeing is impacted.
What does this shift mean? If resilience, financial health and meaningful outcomes are clearly becoming more important measures of success, the product agenda broadens as well. Credit cannot meet all customer needs. Savings, insurance, payments, emergency liquidity and other forms of risk management become more important when the objective is not simply to provide finance, but to help people withstand and recover from shocks.
Shifting Challenges and Escalating Risks
As many survey respondents shared, the operating environment for financial service providers is becoming more difficult. At the same time the sector’s focus rightly shifts away from over-dependence on credit, or simple access to accounts, many of the conditions within which inclusive finance operates are becoming less forgiving.
Climate is a key driver of this dynamic, with climate adaptation and climate-smart finance ranking first among current trends and first among future priorities, while climate-related threats to client and household resilience are among the leading challenges. But the importance of climate in the Compass goes beyond its position in any ranking. Respondents connect it to livelihoods, portfolio risk, small and medium enterprise performance, household resilience, insurance, migration, gender, funding, and product design.
That suggests a significant change in how the sector understands climate risk. Climate-smart finance is becoming less a specialist “vertical” alongside other areas of financial inclusion, and more a condition under which much of the industry now has to operate. More and more, funders, researchers and other sector stakeholders want to know not just whether a financial service provider has a “climate product,” but how changing climate exposure affects ordinary decisions about clients, products, risk and investment.
Frontier technology presents a different version of the same problem. AI, machine learning and automation are the second-highest-ranked trend in this year’s Compass. Yet “AI, data misuse and new forms of fraud outpacing providers and regulators” ranks as the leading current challenge. And the quantitative results don’t tell the full story; respondents’ comments show they are genuinely anxious.
That apparent contradiction is revealing. Respondents can see clear opportunities in these technologies: better credit appraisal, more efficient back-office processes, improved client interaction and stronger fraud detection. But they also raise concerns about bias, transparency, explainability, privacy, fraud and the exclusion of people with weak digital footprints.
The constraint, then, may be less about the technology per se than whether institutions have the data, skills, processes, governance and consumer-protection systems needed to use it responsibly.
A Tightening Funding Environment
Respondents also shared that more is being asked of institutions just as money gets tighter. Changing capital flows are among the leading trends in the Compass, while shrinking or volatile donor and public funding is one of the highest-ranked challenges. When respondents were asked who might fill the resulting funding gap, there was no convincing consensus: Local or regional finance received the largest share of responses, but only 22.2%. Social and impact investors followed. Strikingly, “no one — the gap will remain” tied with philanthropy, foundations and high-net-worth individuals for third place. Commercial investors ranked lowest among the main options.
However, respondents are not calling for a return to traditional donor dependency. Many pointed instead towards a more diversified financing system involving local capital, impact investment, philanthropy, development finance institutions, commercial finance and blended structures.
But diversification does not make the underlying problem disappear. Different sources of capital have different return requirements, risk appetites, time horizons and constraints. The issue is therefore not so much about how much money there is, but about where it goes and what that capital will be willing to finance. This is particularly important because the populations that remain excluded are the most costly and difficult to serve.
Last-mile reach remains one of the sector’s leading challenges. Meanwhile, providers are being asked to respond to greater client vulnerability, climate exposure and technological change, to improve outcomes rather than merely outreach — and to do all this while capital becomes tighter or less predictable. And so the sector is adopting a more demanding definition of what successful financial inclusion looks like, at precisely the moment when the economics of delivering it to some groups is becoming more difficult.
Overlapping, Compounding Challenges
Making things more complicated, these issues no longer fit neatly into silos. By necessity in a (partly) quantitative ranking exercise, the Compass has to put trends or challenges into discrete silos. But while there is value in this, it masks what is a long-term blurring of the edges between interrelated, compounding and cross-cutting topics.
Changes in the climate affect the financial needs of households and businesses, and the risks faced by providers and investors. Technology can lower delivery costs and extend capability, but it also creates new governance and consumer-protection demands. Funding determines which innovations can be developed and which client groups remain financially viable to serve. And resilience depends on how products, institutions, markets and public policy work together. These different pressures reinforce and sometimes conflict with each other.
That is why the defining feature of financial inclusion in 2026 is not about any single headline trend, but about the growing complexity and interdependence of the needs and challenges the industry is facing. As the survey responses repeatedly highlight, the sector must become more adaptive, context-specific and capable of responding to several pressures at once. There will not be a single technology, financing mechanism or product innovation that resolves these questions. Nor are climate, digitalisation, funding and exclusion separate agendas that can be delegated to different teams and dealt with independently.
An era of harder choices
Taken together, the 2026 Compass describes a sector in transition. The earlier challenge of extending access has not gone away. But it is being joined by a more complicated set of expectations: Access should lead to greater resilience and meaningful outcomes; institutions should adapt to climate risk; technology should improve capability without undermining trust; and scarce capital should somehow continue to support people and markets that may be relatively expensive or risky to serve.
The broad direction identified in the Compass is therefore a move away from an era characterised mainly by access, growth and donor-supported expansion, and towards one increasingly shaped by resilience, adaptation, commercial pressure, and harder choices about who gets served, how and at what cost.
In an upcoming article on e-MFP’s site, we’ll look at what these hard choices mean for different stakeholder groups within the inclusive finance ecosystem.
Sam Mendelson is a researcher and consultant, and since 2018 the project lead and author of the Financial Inclusion Compass.
Photo credit: erikreis
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