The Global Findex is the world's most comprehensive data set on financial inclusion. Launched with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and published every three years, it consists of nationally representative surveys of roughly 150,000 adults in more than 140 economies. When the Global Findex was first launched in 2011, just 51 percent of the world's adult population owned a financial account. The 2017 Global Findex shows that 1.2 billion adults have opened an account since then, bringing the share of financially included adults to 69 percent. Yet progress has been uneven among economies, and usage continues to be a challenge.

What are the key findings from the latest Findex? What can be done to close the gender gap in developing countries, which has persisted at 9 percentage points? In this blog series, CGAP digs into the latest Findex data for answers to these and other questions of critical importance for the financial inclusion community going forward.