Twelve percent of all adults in sub-Saharan Africa use their phones for non-bank financial transactions, by far the highest rate of any region in the world, according to a report released Wednesday by the World Bank. These figures come from the World Bank’s Global Financial Inclusion database, known as the Findex. The mobile revolution there is part of a broader trend of democratization of finance around the globe that’s giving far more people a first step into the financial world. The number of adults worldwide with a bank account grew by 700 million between 2011 and 2014, according to the World Bank, an 11 percentage point rise to 62 percent of all adults.
