Understanding the Unbanked

Every country has the ‘unbanked’, those without access to the financial system ¹. A paper at the end of last year from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia explored the situation in the US by looking at the biennial Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) National Survey of Unbanked and Underbanked between 2015 and 2019. The paper aimed to understand those who are unbanked and how these relationships evolved.

The FDIC household survey collects data on bank account ownership and household characteristics, combined with state-level variables. Unbanked and underbanked households fell from 7% in 2015 to 5.4% in 2019, 4.5% in 2021, and subsequently 4.3% in 2023.

The 2021 survey found that 34.9% of households that had newly opened bank accounts had opened them in order to receive government COVID-19 benefit payments.