Financial inclusion tends to appear in corporate reporting under the heading of social responsibility. I understand why. But I think the framing does the idea a disservice, because it implies a trade-off between doing the right thing and running a good business.
In financial services, that trade-off is often not there.
Why the underserved are underserved
Customers get excluded from financial products for reasons that are usually structural rather than deliberate:
- Products designed around assumptions they do not meet — a certain type of employment record, a certain minimum balance, a certain documentation trail.
- Distribution built for where they are not.
- Interfaces built in a language they do not read comfortably.
- Pricing structured around a usage pattern that does not match theirs.
- Risk models trained on populations they are not part of, so they look risky when they are simply unfamiliar.
Notice that none of these are statements about the customer’s actual creditworthiness, loyalty, or lifetime value. They are statements about product design.
The commercial logic
Underserved segments have characteristics that any commercial leader should find interesting.
They are large. Segments that incumbents have not prioritised are, by definition, less competed for.
They are loyal. The provider that first treats a customer with dignity and gives them a product that actually fits earns a level of retention that heavily-marketed-to segments never show.
They are high-frequency. Many underserved customers transact more often, in smaller amounts, than affluent customers. Frequency compounds.
They generate excellent data. Serving a population others avoid teaches you things about that population that competitors cannot learn from the outside.
The difficulty is that the unit economics only work if the cost to serve is genuinely engineered down. Which brings us to the real point.
It is an engineering problem
Serving thin-margin customers profitably requires:
- Onboarding that is fast, digital, and low-touch without being careless.
- Support that resolves common issues without a human, so humans are available for the uncommon ones.
- Risk assessment that uses alternative signals — transaction behaviour, payment consistency — rather than only conventional records.
- Distribution that meets people where they already are.
These are all solvable. They are not free, and they are not quick. But they are ordinary product and operations problems, not acts of generosity.
A caution worth stating
There is a version of “serving the underserved” that is extractive — high fees justified by the argument that the alternative is nothing at all. I do not think that is inclusion. It is arbitrage on a lack of options, and it does not survive the moment a better option appears.
The test I would apply: if this customer had ten competing offers in front of them, would they still choose ours? If the honest answer is no, then the business is built on their constraint rather than on our value.
The point
The customers other institutions have not bothered to design for represent one of the more interesting commercial opportunities available. Treating that as a moral obligation understates it. It is a strategy — and one with a long runway.
Dr. Mohamed Mousa writes about financial services, technology, and leadership.