Underbanked vs Unbanked

There are over three billion people on this planet who live just outside the edges of the formal financial system. Not criminals. Not rebels. Just invisible. They work, they save, they build — but they do so in the shadows, because the system doesn’t see them.

Or worse still it sees them and turns them away.

We call them the “underbanked” as if it’s a data problem. As if they just need an app or a debit card and all will be well. But this isn’t a tech issue. It’s a worldview issue.

The dominant financial system was built in and for the West. It assumes certain behaviours, documents, infrastructures — and it assumes that if you don’t fit that mould, you must be a risk. The problem isn’t that these 3 billion people lack legitimacy. The problem is that legitimacy itself is narrowly defined.

I’ve sat across from farmers in Zambia who run tight, profitable operations entirely on mobile money and trust networks. They don’t have tax returns, but they have reputational capital within their communities that runs deeper than any credit score. I’ve seen young professionals in the Middle East operating across jurisdictions with nothing but WhatsApp and informal networks to manage their affairs — and doing so flawlessly. These aren’t edge cases. This is the global norm.

So why does the system see them as unbankable?

Because the existing rails can’t interpret their signals. They rely on forms of proof that don’t translate — PDFs, legacy systems, utility bills that don’t exist, and passports that are treated like red flags. Something that makes a lot of sense in London or New York, but even there they’re outdated and now much more of a box tick than a true measure of risk. Meanwhile, the people themselves are left either to operate in cash economies or, worse, to enter the financial system through third parties who strip them of agency in the process

And the irony of this is that these are the very markets that will drive global growth over the next fifty years. The underbanked aren’t marginal. They are the future.

So it’s a mixed issue of it being both unjust and economically detrimental.

The cost of financial invisibility is immense. It limits upward mobility. It stunts entrepreneurship. It erodes dignity. But most insidiously, it cements dependency — because without access to capital, you’re trapped. You can’t build, scale, or plan. You’re always operating on someone else’s terms.

So what’s the solution?

It starts with perspective. We have to stop treating these communities as beneficiaries and start seeing them as equals. Not objects of aid, but participants in a redefined global system.

Then we rebuild the infrastructure — from the core. This doesn’t mean tweaking the front end of banking apps. It means designing systems from the ground up that are culturally aware, technologically adaptive, and institutionally flexible.

Systems that can interpret informal trust. Systems that can process fragmented data and turn it into usable insight. Systems that are able to ask not, “Where is your bank statement?” but “How do you prove your value where you live?”

Inclusion is not about bringing the margins to the centre. It’s about reshaping the centre itself to accommodate the full complexity of global human experience.

Because if the system can’t recognise someone’s legitimacy, that’s not a reflection on them. It’s a reflection on the system.

Those 3 billion underbanked? They’re not waiting. They’re working. They’re adapting. And they’re building parallel systems in spite of — not because of — the financial world we built for ourselves.

My writing on this website forms a small part of my wider journey — a lifelong fascination with understanding and exploring how culture, technology, and consciousness shape the world we live in, and a search for evidence that far more connects us than separates us.

Through my work at Tintra Group and The Tintra Foundation, incredible teams are turning that exploration into practice — reimagining finance and development for a multipolar world.