adults—270 million of those without an account—send or receive domestic remittances only in cash, while 5 percent of unbanked adults—100 million—do so only through over-the-counter transactions. This suggests an enormous opportunity for designing appropriate, affordable, and convenient financial products to enable unbanked adults to send or receive domestic remittances through an account. This opportunity is especially large in Sub-Saharan Africa, where 22 percent of unbanked adults—almost 80 million people—send or receive domestic remittances only in cash, and 12 percent of unbanked adults—40 million—do so only through over-the-counter transactions.

## Increasing the use of accounts

Account ownership is an important first step toward financial inclusion. But once people have an account, the next step is to ensure that they are able to use it in ways that allow them to fully benefit from financial inclusion. Three-quarters of account holders already use their account to save, to make at least three withdrawals a month, or to make or receive electronic payments. Yet many opportunities remain for increasing the use of accounts among the banked, especially in developing economies.

In developing economies more than 1.3 billion adults with an account—58 percent of account holders—pay utility bills in cash, and more than half a billion—24 percent of those with an account—pay school fees in cash. Shifting these payments to accounts represents an enormous opportunity for increasing the use of accounts and making payments more convenient.

When it comes to utility bills and school fees, however, the choice of whether to pay digitally or in cash often resides with the utility companies and schools. Encouraging them to provide convenient and affordable ways for customers to make electronic payments from their accounts—by using such technology as mobile phones or point-of-sale terminals—could increase the efficiency of these payments on both sides.

Another opportunity for increasing account use is to encourage adults with an account who now send or receive domestic remittances exclusively in cash or through over-thecounter transactions to instead do so through their account. In developing economies this involves 355 million adults with an account—13 percent of account holders—including 35 million in Sub-Saharan Africa.

# How and why people save

The Global Findex data also document how and why people save. Globally in 2014, 56 percent of adults reported having saved or set aside money in the past 12 months. Adults in high-income OECD economies and East Asia and the Pacific were the most likely to have done so, with 71 percent reporting that they had saved, followed by those in SubSaharan Africa (60 percent). In other regions between 30 and 40 percent of adults reported having saved in the past 12 months.

A quarter of adults—or almost half of savers—reported having saved formally, at a bank or another type of financial institution. Among savers, the share who reported saving formally was more than 70 percent in high-income OECD economies but only about 40 percent in developing economies. Compared with 2011, the share of adults saving

> THE GLOBAL FINDEX DATABASE 6