More than 700m people leave ranks of the 'unbanked'

New mobile payment platforms have contributed to a surge in bank account holders in the developing world with more than 700m people leaving the ranks of the "unbanked" in the past three years, according to a World Bank survey.

But the 140-country survey of 150,000 adults conducted last year and released on Wednesday also highlights the huge challenges that remain in meeting a goal of getting universal access to financial services by 2020.

Some 2bn people in the world - more than a quarter of the global population - remain without bank accounts, the survey found, in what is widely seen as a significant barrier to exiting poverty. More than half of the poorest 40 per cent of people in developing countries still do not have accounts.

Even when people have accounts there is still a significant gap in the sort of banking services that the world's poorest can access. While many payments in the rich world are increasingly digital, 1.3bn people with bank accounts in the developing world still have to pay their garbage, water and electric bills in cash, the survey found. More than 500m are forced to use cash to pay school fees.

Leora Klapper, the World Bank researcher who led the project, said the reliance on cash in many parts of the developing world remains a huge drag on economies and development.

In Bangladesh, she told the FT in an interview, she had met factory owners who were forced to truck in cash each month to pay workers and to shut down production for days at a time to dole out salaries. In parts of rural Africa, schools closed for days each month because teachers had to go to cities in person to be paid in cash.

A significant gender gap also remains in the access to accounts. A similar survey in 2011 found that less than half of the women in the world had a bank account. That number rose to 58 per cent in the latest survey. But women still lagged behind men globally in holding accounts with the issue particularly acute in South Asia where just 37 per cent of women have a bank account versus 55 per cent of men.

Those sorts of problems have endured despite a surge in the use of mobile payment platforms in many parts of the developing world. In countries such as Cote d'Ivoire, Somalia, Tanzania and Uganda more adults have mobile money accounts than traditional bank accounts, the World Bank found.

"Where we have seen [the use of mobile money] take off it has had a profound effect," Ms Klapper said, with the new platforms often used disproportionately by poor people who previously had no access to banking.

In Kenya, for example, adults in the poorest 40 per cent of households were significantly more likely than adults in the richest 60 per cent to have a mobile money account, Ms Klapper said, with almost a third of poorer adults reporting having such accounts versus less than 15 per cent of richer adults.

The survey was conducted by Gallup and funded in part by a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

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