Asia Pacific Fintech Boom Leaves Millions Behind

New GSMA report maps a region of striking contrasts, where blockchain-powered payment rails and AI-driven credit scoring coexist with deep divides in access, literacy, and trust.

Key takeaways

• Asia Pacific holds 41% of the world’s 2.1 billion mobile money accounts, yet 1.3 billion adults globally remain locked out of the formal financial system.
• India, Cambodia and Thailand show how digital public infrastructure like UPI, Bakong and PromptPay can drive near universal payment adoption, while Pakistan and Myanmar reveal how far the inclusion frontier still stretches.
• Closing the gender, literacy, and trust gaps, not just expanding access, will determine whether the region’s fintech boom translates into real financial health for the unbanked.

From Cambodia’s blockchain backed payment system processing transactions worth three times the country’s GDP, to Pakistan’s gender gap that still leaves millions of women outside the formal financial system, a sweeping new report from the GSMA paints a complex portrait of digital finance across Asia Pacific, a region that is simultaneously a world leader in fintech innovation and home to the largest concentration of unbanked adults on the planet.

The report, Digital Financial Services in Asia Pacific: Driving Inclusion Through Innovation, published by GSMA Intelligence in April 2026, examines twelve markets across the region and concludes that while digital financial services (DFS) have delivered transformative gains in financial inclusion, progress remains deeply uneven, shaped by regulatory ambition, infrastructure investment, and the persistent barriers of literacy, trust, and gender.

A Global Surge, Unevenly Distributed

The headline trend is unmistakably positive. According to the World Bank’s Findex 2025 study cited in the report, global account ownership climbed from 62% of adults in 2014 to 79% in 2024, a jump driven largely by the proliferation of mobile-based financial services. In low-income countries, the proportion of adults holding a mobile money account rose from just 2% a decade ago to 16% globally by the end of 2024, with the figure reaching 32% in the world’s poorest nations.

By December 2024, East Asia & Pacific and South Asia together accounted for 41% of the world’s 2.1 billion registered mobile money accounts. South Asian markets recorded a 20% year on year growth in transaction volume, while East Asia & Pacific saw a 16% increase, with transaction values of $257 billion and $238 billion, respectively.

Yet approximately 1.3 billion adults, the majority of them in Africa and the Asia Pacific, remain entirely outside the formal financial system. And even where accounts exist, the report warns, access has not always translated into improved financial health. “Increased access to financial services has not always resulted in improved financial health,” the report states, noting that many account holders still depend on informal savings and credit and struggle to manage irregular incomes.

The economic stakes are considerable. GSMA Intelligence analysis cited in the report estimates that, as of 2023, countries with mobile money systems had GDP levels $720 billion higher than they would otherwise have been, a 1.7% uplift attributed directly to mobile money adoption.

Three Models, One Convergence

One of the report’s central analytical contributions is its mapping of the operating models that define DFS across the region. It identifies three principal types: bank-led models, where traditional financial institutions retain primary customer relationships; non-bank-led models, where mobile network operators (MNOs) and fintech firms hold the dominant position; and hybrid models, increasingly the direction of travel for the entire region.

The report documents a clear and accelerating shift toward hybrid DFS structures, driven by a convergence of government incentives to promote financial inclusion, technological advances such as AI and cloud computing, and market demand for personalised, scalable, and secure services that no single entity model can reliably deliver.

This evolution has unfolded in four identifiable stages, from basic single-use mobile wallets offering airtime top-ups, through QR payment ecosystems and bank integrations, to fully fledged super apps and digital banks. The Philippines’ GCash, which began in 2004 as a USSD-based airtime service, and Cambodia’s Wing Bank, which evolved from a simple money transfer operator into a licensed commercial bank, exemplify how DFS providers have matured into comprehensive financial hubs within a single generation.

Country by Country: Pioneers and Laggards

The report’s twelve market profiles reveal a region that defies simple generalisations.

India stands apart as a benchmark for digital public infrastructure (DPI). Its Unified Payments Interface (UPI), introduced in 2016, has become a global protocol, now accepted in France, Singapore, and the UAE, enabling Indian tourists to pay local merchants in rupees without forex markups. By mid 2025, digital payments represented 99.8% of total transaction volume in India, an extraordinary achievement for a country of 1.45 billion people where 63% of the population lives in rural areas. India’s Aadhaar biometric identity system underpins the entire ecosystem, reducing customer acquisition costs, minimising fraud, and enabling access to credit and insurance.

Cambodia’s Bakong platform, built on blockchain by the National Bank of Cambodia, has become one of the region’s most ambitious DPI stories. As of September 2025, it had connected 70 financial institutions, supported 34 million user accounts, and processed over 600 million transactions valued at $147 billion. More than 4.5 million Cambodian merchants now accept KHQR, the national QR standard, which has overtaken cash to become the country’s leading payment method, accounting for 47.2% of transactions.

Thailand presents perhaps the clearest model of government-led digital transformation. PromptPay, the country’s flagship instant payment system, launched in 2017, processes more than 75 million daily transactions. Thailand’s financial inclusion rate stands at 92% of adults, with women slightly ahead of men, a phenomenon the report attributes in part to cultural norms in which women manage household finances. Three new digital bank licences were issued in 2025, with operations expected by 2026, targeting underserved segments such as SMEs.

Indonesia has seen an extraordinary rise in QR payments. Its QRIS system, introduced in 2019, recorded 2.6 billion transactions between March 2024 and March 2025, a year on year increase of 596%, making it the fastest-growing form of digital payment in the country. Around 80% of Indonesian adults now have access to formal financial services, up from just 36% in 2014.

Pakistan, by contrast, illustrates the scale of the challenge that remains. Financial inclusion reached 67% in 2025, up from 47% in 2018, driven by microfinance and digital banking initiatives, a significant leap, but still below the regional average. The gender gap, while narrowing from 47 to 30 percentage points, remains “significantly higher than in most other countries in the region,” the report notes. Only 27% of the population uses a smartphone, and 62% lives in rural areas. The country’s Raast instant payment platform, launched in 2021, has processed over 3 billion transactions worth nearly PKR 80 trillion ($285 billion) since launch, offering a foundation on which further inclusion can be built.

Myanmar presents a distinctive case of mobile-led inclusion in a constrained environment. With the most recent financial inclusion estimate dating to 2018 at 48%, the country has shifted almost entirely toward DFS, capitalising on 70% smartphone penetration. Wave Money, the first non-bank entity licensed under Myanmar’s mobile financial services regulation, now serves 35 million customers through an agent network of over 58,000 outlets, the majority operated by women.

The Three Pillars: Regulation, Infrastructure, Partnership

The report identifies three interlocking enablers that determine the pace and depth of digital financial inclusion in any given market: progressive regulation, robust digital public infrastructure (DPI), and collaborative cross-sector partnerships.

On regulation, the emergence of specialised licensing regimes, digital banking licences, e-money issuance permits, branchless banking authorisations, and fintech licences has been transformative, allowing non-traditional players to enter markets that were previously the exclusive domain of commercial banks. Regulatory sandboxes have become a cornerstone of DFS policy across the region, offering controlled environments for testing blockchain remittances, AI-driven credit scoring, and P2P lending before full-scale deployment.

On infrastructure, the availability of national instant payment systems and secure digital identity frameworks is increasingly the decisive factor separating markets that are scaling rapidly from those that are stagnating. Countries that invested early in DPI, India’s UPI, Thailand’s PromptPay, Pakistan’s Raast, have seen markedly faster adoption, broader use cases, and smoother participation from both banks and non-banks.

On partnerships, the report is categorical: “DFS ecosystems are highly complex, making it challenging for any single provider to achieve success independently.” Strategic alliances between MNOs, banks, fintech firms, government agencies, and commercial platforms, from GCash’s agricultural supply chain partnerships in the Philippines to Wave Money’s collaboration with MoneyGram for international remittances in Myanmar, are described as vital catalysts for scaling inclusion to the hardest-to-reach populations.

The Persistent Gaps: Gender, Literacy, and Trust

Alongside the progress narrative, the report catalogues a set of recurring barriers that threaten to entrench a usage gap even as access gaps close.

The digital gender divide remains acute across the region. In Cambodia, only 60% of women have access to formal financial services compared to 73% of men. Pakistan’s gender gap in financial access, while narrowing, remains the starkest in the study. The report attributes these disparities to compounding disadvantages: lower digital and financial literacy, reduced smartphone ownership, greater exposure to fraud risk, and cultural barriers to engaging with formal institutions.

Low digital financial literacy is consistently identified as a primary obstacle to DFS uptake. “Even when services are available, user willingness to adopt or effectively use them plays a crucial role,” the report notes. Apprehensions about fraud, difficulty navigating app interfaces, and a reluctance to move away from cash all dampen take-up, particularly among rural populations, older citizens, and those employed in the informal economy.

Business model sustainability presents a parallel challenge. Many DFS providers, the report acknowledges, are squeezed by low-value transactions, high distribution costs, and narrow margins, a combination that makes it commercially difficult to serve remote areas or develop the more sophisticated products, such as credit, savings, and micro insurance, that could deliver deeper financial health outcomes.

Eight Priorities for the Decade Ahead

The report concludes with a set of eight strategic opportunities for stakeholders, governments, regulators, MNOs, fintech firms, and development partners, seeking to accelerate inclusion:

Enhancing digital and financial literacy through targeted community campaigns, SMS programmes, and locally developed applications.

Expanding agent networks by leveraging existing businesses as trusted community hubs, particularly in underserved rural areas.

Accelerating cross-border transfer initiatives to reach unbanked populations that depend on remittances for basic needs, education, and business investment.

Addressing demand side barriers, including the cost of DFS relative to cash, fraud risk perceptions and the degree to which available products genuinely meet user needs.

Adopting best practice in DPI development, building interoperable layers for digital identification, instant payments, and secure data exchange to replace fragmented, siloed systems.

Digitalising government payment flows, both from government to citizens (G2P) and from citizens to government (P2G), which often serve as a first point of entry into the formal financial system for vulnerable groups.

Using alternative data for credit scoring, including mobile transaction history, utility payments, and social media behaviour, to develop models that extend credit access to rural women, gig workers, and SMEs who lack conventional financial records.

Incorporating AI, edge computing, and blockchain into product development to support scalability, inclusion, and regulatory compliance, and as a gateway to more advanced services, including decentralised finance.

Conclusion

The GSMA’s analysis offers a timely corrective to two competing narratives about digital finance in Asia Pacific: the triumphalist account of a region leading the world in fintech innovation, and the pessimistic view that structural inequalities render inclusion aspirations hollow.

The reality, as the report demonstrates across twelve distinct markets, is more nuanced and ultimately more hopeful. The infrastructure is increasingly in place. The regulatory frameworks are maturing. The partnerships are forming. What remains is a question of will and design, whether governments, companies, and development partners can direct the momentum of DFS toward the populations it has not yet fully reached: rural women in Cambodia, informal workers in Indonesia, smallholder farmers in Nepal, the unbanked millions in Pakistan and Myanmar.

As the report’s authors conclude, recognising the diversity of the DFS landscape is not just an analytical necessity; it is the prerequisite for advancing financial inclusion on a meaningful scale.

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