2 bln adults worldwide without bank account despite rapid growth of account ownership: poll

About 2 billion adults worldwide remain excluded from the financial system despite rapid growth of bank account ownership in the past years, U.S. polling company Gallup reported Friday.

Citing polling data collected in 2014 for the Global Findex Database of the World Bank, Gallup said that 62 percent of the global adult population owns a bank account, up from 51 percent in 2011.

This resulted from the rapid growth of access to financial services and products in the 2011-2014 period, during which the number of bank account owners grew by an estimated 700 million, according to the report.

It also found that account penetration -- defined as having an account at a formal financial institution or a mobile money account -- remains highly unequal across regions.

While 94 percent of adults has a bank account in high-income Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) economies, slightly more than half of adults (54 percent) have an account in developing economies, where the bank ownership is up 13 percentage points from 41 percent in 2011.

South Asia and the East Asia-Pacific region are home to about half of the world's 2 billion unbanked adults. In South Asia, about 625 million adults lack account access, and the same is true for about 490 million adults in East Asia and the Pacific, it said.

India, China and Indonesia alone account for 38 percent of unbanked adults globally, while sub-Saharan Africa has the next- largest population of unbanked adults, at about 350 million -- or 17 percent of the global total, it added.

Though account penetration has risen across all world regions, the extent of the increase varies widely from 14 points in both South Asia and the East Asia-Pacific region to eight and four points in sub-Saharan Africa and OECD economies, respectively.

The data also shows that the unbanked population is disproportionately poor and female. Forty-two percent of women are unbanked, compared with 35 percent of men. Meanwhile, half of the unbanked worldwide -- 1 billion adults -- belong to the poorest 40 percent of households.

The results are based on telephone and face-to-face interviews conducted in 2014 with approximately 1,000 adults, aged 15 and older, in each of more than 140 economies, Gallup said. Endite