For years, financial inclusion has been measured through relatively simple milestones: Does someone have a bank account? Can they access a mobile wallet? Have they registered for a financial app?

These are useful indicators, but they can also give us a false sense of progress.

Imagine a woman who downloads a fintech app, passes verification and opens an account. On paper, another customer has entered the formal financial system. Yet if she rarely uses the account, depends on someone else to make financial decisions, cannot access appropriate credit or never moves beyond basic payments, it is hard to argue that her economic position has changed substantially.

This is the gap fintech companies increasingly need to pay attention to. Financial inclusion does not happen at the moment of registration. It develops across several stages: first access, then meaningful and independent usage, and eventually an economic outcome.

And women can be lost at every stage.

Access Is Only the First Layer of Financial Inclusion

The most obvious barrier is still access itself.

According to the GSMA’s Mobile Gender Gap Report 2026, around 810 million women across low- and middle-income countries are not using mobile internet. Women are also 12% less likely than men to use mobile internet and 13% less likely to own a smartphone.

For a fintech industry built increasingly around mobile-first distribution, these gaps matter before product design even enters the conversation.

A financial app may technically be available to everyone. However, availability is not the same as accessibility. If one group is less likely to own the necessary device, afford regular connectivity or feel confident using digital services, then supposedly universal digital infrastructure is already reaching people unevenly.

This is why account ownership tells us something important, but incomplete at the same time. It shows who managed to enter the system, but what happened afterward? This is a question to which we do not yet have a truly precise answer.

A Smartphone Cannot Remove Every Barrier

A recent study of digital financial adoption among women in Pakistan offers a useful illustration.

The research found that mobile money adoption was associated with greater odds of women being financially included. Yet internet access on its own did not have a statistically significant effect.

That finding challenges one of the easier assumptions surrounding digital finance: that once people are connected, financial participation naturally follows.

It does not.

Digital infrastructure can reduce geographical and transactional barriers, but it cannot automatically change household dynamics, social norms, financial literacy, trust or control over money. Two women may have the same smartphone, the same banking app and technically identical access to a financial product while having very different levels of financial agency.

One may independently decide how to save and invest. Another may have an account but need permission to use funds, rely on a family member to navigate the service or use it only to receive money that is immediately withdrawn.

From a product dashboard, both can appear as acquired customers. Economically, they are very different users.

The Problem With Measuring Registrations

Fintech is exceptionally good at measuring the top of the funnel.

Downloads, registrations, completed KYC checks, funded accounts and first transactions are visible, comparable and easy to report. They are also closely connected to commercial growth, so naturally they attract attention.

However, when companies use those numbers to make broader claims about financial inclusion, something gets lost.

Suppose a platform acquires 200,000 female users in a market. That sounds significant, yes, but a more interesting set of questions would be: 

• How many are still active six months later? 

• Do they use the same range of products as male customers? 

• Where do they drop out? 

• Are women applying for credit but receiving smaller limits? 

• Are they opening investment accounts but leaving them unfunded? 

• Are they using savings tools consistently enough to build financial buffers?

Those questions move the conversation from presence to participation.

They can also reveal barriers that aggregate user numbers hide.

A fintech company may discover, for example, that its gender gap does not exist at registration but appears later, when customers move into more sophisticated financial products. Women may use payment functions at similar rates to men but adopt investment products less often. They may apply for lending products but abandon the process at a particular verification stage. They may keep accounts active while holding systematically lower balances.

None of these patterns can be understood by looking at account ownership alone.

This is also where questions of product design and algorithmic decision-making start to overlap. As we have explored in Women Leading the Way’s latest magazine, a system does not need to explicitly use gender as an input to produce unequal outcomes. Historical data, behavioural proxies and differences in users’ financial histories can reproduce existing disadvantages.

The same principle applies to the customer journey itself. A theoretically neutral product can produce very different outcomes depending on who is realistically able to progress through it.

The Most Important Metric Comes Last

The hardest part of the framework is also the most valuable: measuring what financial technology actually enables people to do.

If someone uses a fintech product for a year, what has changed?

Perhaps she has built an emergency fund for the first time. Established a credit history. Received financing for a small business. Begun investing. Reduced dependence on cash. Gained more control over household money. Or become better able to absorb a sudden expense without borrowing informally.

These are far more meaningful signs of inclusion than a download.

The exact outcome will, of course, depend on the product. A payments company cannot be judged by the same metrics as an investment platform, but every financial product has an underlying economic purpose, and companies can measure whether users are actually reaching it.

For a lending platform, that might mean looking beyond approval rates towards whether customers build sustainable credit histories and gain access to better financing over time.

For an investment app, success may mean examining whether female customers move from registration to funded accounts, diversified portfolios and recurring investments.

For digital wallets, the question may be whether users remain limited to receiving and withdrawing money or begin using the product to save, pay merchants, run businesses and manage finances more broadly.

The common principle we would say is that the metric should follow the financial value the product claims to create.

That matters particularly as women become increasingly important owners and managers of capital. In Women Leading the Way magazine, we have previously looked at the difference between women inheriting wealth and women actually gaining greater influence over how that wealth is allocated. The same distinction applies at every income level. Having access to money and having agency over money are related, but they are not identical.

Financial Inclusion Should Be Measured by What Changes

Fintech has already made financial services easier to distribute than at almost any point in history. A customer can open an account, transfer money or begin investing without entering a bank branch. That is a major achievement.

However, reducing the distance between a woman and a financial product is not necessarily the same thing as reducing the distance between her and financial independence.

The next stage of financial inclusion will therefore require better questions. Not simply how many women signed up, but how many stayed. How many used the product independently. How many gained access to financial tools they did not have before. And ultimately, how many became economically stronger because the product existed.

An account tells us who entered the financial system. The more important question is what they were able to do once they got inside.