Financial inclusion, still a long road ahead

APARAJITA, 55, is a senior executive at a multinational headquartered in Lower Parel, and lives in a sea-facing apartment in Bandra with a membership at a club most Mumbaikars only enter as guests. she drives a BMW, she just got back from her annual relaxation trip to Marrakesh, and by every visible measure, has made it. But when asked where she invests and what her portfolio looks like, she laughs, waves a hand dismissively, and says she doesn’t understand a word of it. “My husband handles all that,” she says without embarrassment. In a Mumbai local ladies’ compartment, another woman is busy trading on the cellphone, scrolling through NSE charts and graphs. It’s been a while, she says; it started out of interest, she figured it out along the way. Two women, same city, different relationships with money. India’s financial inclusion story is complicated. On paper, the numbers look like progress. More than 89% of Indian women now have bank accounts, up from just 26% in 2011. Most of these accounts are for direct-benefit transfer. The Jan-Dhan-Aadhaar-Mobile (JAM) architecture, aimed at the financial inclusion of the poorest of the poor, is a genuine policy achievement. More than half of all Jan Dhan accounts are held by women but government data says remarkably little about how these women actually use these accounts. Access and agency are not the same thing, and India has been conflating the two for long enough that the gap has calcified into something structural. ACCOUNTS WITHOUT AGENCY: The LXME-EY report ‘Unlocking Her Wealth: The Untapped Economy,’ released in 2026, puts a number to this gap through its Women’s Financial Prosperity Index (WFPI). The WFPI evaluates women’s financial well-being across four dimensions: access, inclusion, agency, and outcomes. The total score? Just 28.1%. This points to the actual gap between women’s bank account ownership and prosperity score. With 89% women holding bank accounts, the problem is not access, but what happens after the account is opened. The report states that over 40% of such women-owned bank accounts remain dormant. Three out of four women do not actively use UPI (the Unified Payments Interface) that powers 85% of India’s digital payments business. Women’s everyday UPI usage stands at 33%, compared with 41% for the overall population. While 69% of women use digital banking in some form, only 44% transact meaningfully across payments, savings, insurance, and investments combined. Gautam Aggarwal, president, India and South Asia, Mastercard, agrees that access alone is not enough. “The ecosystem must recognise women as a distinct customer segment, and design with intent to help them feel confident in their financial understanding, decision-making, and choices.” The credit system makes this worse in ways that rarely get discussed. A woman in a single-income household may have a bank account, use digital payments, and be perfectly capable of managing credit — but because she lacks an independent credit history, she is likely to receive an add-on card rather than a primary card. According to the RBI, women account for 22% of individual borrowers but hold only 16% of the total value of outstanding loans; 79% of women-owned businesses are self-financed, and only 7% of credit to MSMEs goes to women. Aggarwal’s framing is pointed. “A woman who transacts frequently but owns nothing is financially vulnerable.” THE PERMISSION ECONOMY: Meghna Pant, an award-winning author and journalist, has a different word for the same phenomenon. “The gap between access and control shows up in the quietest, most dangerous place: permission,” she says. “Access is external, but control is internal and socially negotiated, and that negotiation is where most women are still losing.” The financial literacy argument that women don’t invest because they don’t understand financial products is, she argues, a convenient misreading. “Women are not excluded because they don’t understand money. They are excluded because they have been taught not to trust themselves with it.” Pant describes how financial exclusion often operates inside households rather than outside them. Women manage budgets, school fees, and healthcare costs; they are basically the operating CFOs of the house. But when it comes to investments, insurance, or property, the men decide. “Financial abuse rarely arrives dramatically,” she says. “It seeps in disguised as care. It begins with ‘let me handle this’ and ‘you don’t need to worry.’” Between access and agency, there is an important block of income, and Vetri Subramaniam, MD and CEO of UTI Asset Management Company, says it plainly: “Wealth creation is a facet of investing. Investing is downstream of income. You must first have an income, then you have savings, and then you look to invest.” Arti Porwal, head of South Asia at CFA Institute, adds a dimension that sits between income and investing: compensation within the workforce itself. “At the board level, men are earning 3.6 times what women earn. At the KMP level, there is a 70% pay gap. So even at senior leadership levels, there is no parity.” SAVING IS NOT INVESTING: One of the most important insights that the financial industry has been slow to absorb is that women are not passive about money, but are active savers. Not many are investors. Priti Rathi Gupta, founder of Lxme, learnt this the hard way. “When we started, we thought we would focus on financial literacy and then encourage women to invest. But women were not saying, ‘I want to grow my money.’ They were saying, ‘I want to save money’ and ‘I want to achieve my goals.’ Once we understood that, we realised we needed to solve for savings before we could solve for investing.” The approach to building financial products for women has been wrong, as most are built around a linear career trajectory that men follow: they enter the workforce, earn steadily, receive regular increments, and rarely take a break. Women’s financial lives consist of career interruptions for marriage, childbirth, caregiving, or relocation. Subramaniam says the industry needs to show women how products can be used around these disruptions. Gupta says, “Traditionally, you work, build your financial goals, and then build your retirement fund. For women, it should actually be the other way around. Women need to think about retirement first, because they live longer, have multiple career interruptions, and often longer periods outside the workforce. The industry is still not designed around those realities.” WOMEN WHO ALREADY INVEST: None of this means the picture is static. Among the women who have crossed into formal investing, something significant is happening. An AMFI-Crisil report, ‘From Inclusion to Influence’, published in 2026, documents a shift that is easy to miss if you’re only looking at participation numbers. Women accounted for 26.3% of unique individual MF investors as of December 2025, up from 24.2% a year earlier. Their AUM more than tripled from ₹5.44 lakh crore in December 2020 to ₹17.86 lakh crore in December 2025, forming 34.6% of overall individual investor AUM. The proportion of equity in women’s MF AUM rose from 40% in March 2020 to 65% in March 2025. The overall market moved from 26% to 45% equity in the same period. The Equirus Wealth report, which studied more than 55,000 women clients, captures the portfolio-level evidence of this shift. Five years ago, fixed deposits accounted for 45% of allocations, gold and property 30%, and equity mutual funds just 10%. Today, fixed deposits have fallen to 20%, gold and property to 18%, and equity mutual funds have risen to 32%. THE RETIREMENT RECKONING: The number that should concern policymakers, financial institutions, and even every woman in her thirties is this: women hold 40% less retirement wealth than men in India. Across OECD economies, the comparable gap is 26%. But then, what would actually move the needle? Porwal’s answer is more women in finance. “We need a much larger pool of women who are confident about managing money — not only for themselves, but also for clients and institutions. The more women-focussed products and campaigns we have in the market, the stronger the message becomes that financial decision-making is not exclusively a male domain.” Subramaniam says that the industry needs to design for the actual phases of a woman’s financial life. Gupta echoes him, suggesting that the system needs to be rebuilt around how women actually behave, not how the industry assumes they should. “I am probably 0.001% of the women population who has truly been financially included,” she says. “Across the board, whether it is women at the microfinance level, middle-income women, working women, or even HNI women, the gap is huge. We have missed the fact that women need a very differentiated system design.” On the capital markets side, NSDL launched its Women Plan in April 2026, offering a three-year waiver on settlement fees for new women demat accounts opened between April 2026 and March 2027. Demat accounts held by women have risen from 6.67 million in 2021 to over 28 million by early 2026, representing a growth of more than 129%, and now account for nearly 30% of new brokerage clients. These are meaningful signals, but they are supply-side interventions. The demand-side question, of whether the product architecture, advisory culture, and household dynamics have changed enough to meet them, remains open. Pant’s formulation is simpler and probably more durable: “UPI has made women visible, but visibility is not power. The real question is not whether she can spend, but whether she owns, grows, and decides.” India has spent the better part of a decade building the infrastructure for financial inclusion. Account numbers and transaction volumes are up. The plumbing is largely in place. What remains is the harder work of converting access into ownership, savings into wealth, and participation into power. Aparajita’s dismissive wave is the unfinished business.

Financial inclusion, still a long road ahead

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