How should governments and financial institutions expand access to payments for unbanked populations without relying on cash alone?

They should combine mobile money, payment cards, and identity-linked issuance to reduce friction in the path to financial inclusion. The article shows that mobile phone access can help people store value digitally, while card acceptance widens where funds can be used. Pairing payment capability with trusted identity can also help governments deliver benefits faster and reach more people.

Why broader payment access usually fails without more than one rail

Expanding access for unbanked people is not just a question of opening accounts. The practical problem is making value usable in everyday life, across merchants, billers, and government payment channels. A cash-only approach leaves people exposed to theft, travel costs, and limited acceptance, while a single digital rail can fail if phones, cards, or on-ramps are unavailable or unaffordable.

Mobile money matters because it lowers the entry barrier for people who do not have a traditional bank relationship, but it works best when it is part of a broader payment ecosystem. Payment cards extend acceptance where mobile wallets are not yet widely supported, and identity-linked issuance helps governments and institutions connect a person to benefits, transactions, and fraud controls without forcing a bank account first.

How mobile money, cards, and identity-linked issuance work together

A useful inclusion model separates three functions: store value, spend value, and prove entitlement. Mobile money is often the first step for storing and moving small balances digitally. Cards widen the merchant footprint and support recurring or in-person spending. Identity-linked issuance lets a government or financial institution issue value to the right person, reduce duplicate payments, and support recovery when a wallet or card is lost.

This combination also improves interoperability. A benefit payment delivered into a mobile wallet can later be spent through card acceptance or cash-out, depending on local infrastructure and user preference. That flexibility matters because unbanked populations are rarely homogeneous, some have phones but not smartphones, some have cards but limited merchant acceptance, and some still need physical touchpoints for enrollment or dispute resolution.

The key design choice is not to replace cash everywhere at once, but to reduce dependence on cash as the only option. When multiple channels are available, users can migrate gradually, and governments can scale payment programs without waiting for universal banking access. For that reason, payment modernization should treat mobile access, card acceptance, and identity assurance as complementary building blocks rather than competing models.

What this means for public-sector and financial-sector design

Institutions should start by mapping the actual path from issuance to redemption. If the goal is faster benefit delivery, the system has to support enrollment, validation, funding, and spending with minimal manual intervention. If the goal is broader financial inclusion, the rails must be easy to load, easy to use, and available through channels that do not assume a branch relationship or permanent account history.

Trusted identity becomes important because payment inclusion fails when the institution cannot reliably distinguish one recipient from another. Identity-linked issuance can improve targeting, reduce leakage, and make reimbursement or benefits traceable, but it also raises the bar for privacy, enrollment quality, and error handling. When that identity layer is weak, the program may create exclusion at the very moment it is meant to expand access.

For institutions, the practical standard is not “digitise everything,” but “make the digital path reliable enough that cash is no longer the default fallback.” That usually means coordinating payment rails, merchant acceptance, customer support, and exception handling so that people who are not fully banked can still receive, hold, and spend value safely.

Risk and Threat Considerations

Expanding payments without cash as the only fallback reduces friction, but it also creates concentration risk around the identity and payment rails that issue or move value. If enrollment data is wrong, if a wallet or card is compromised, or if the system cannot recover from outages, the same centralised convenience that improves inclusion can also amplify exclusion and fraud.

Failure mechanism: Weak identity proofing, duplicate issuance, account takeover, or card/wallet compromise can redirect funds or block legitimate recipients from using benefits and payments. Availability failures and merchant acceptance gaps can also force users back to cash or leave them unable to transact when they need to.

Impact: The result can be payment leakage, delayed benefits, user distrust, operational overruns, and exclusion of the very populations the programme is trying to reach. In government settings, poor control can also create audit problems and make reconciliation harder across agencies and payment providers.

Standards & Framework Alignment

This section maps relevant standards and security frameworks to the operational risks and controls described in this guidance.

NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 sets the technical controls, while PCI DSS v4.0 and ISO/IEC 27001:2022 define the regulatory obligations.

Framework	Control / Reference	Relevance
NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5	IA-8 — Identification and Authentication (Non-Organizational Users)	Benefits and payment issuance depend on proving recipient identity.
	AC-6 — Least Privilege	Payment and benefit systems should limit who can issue, approve, or move funds.
Recommendation — Require strong recipient authentication before issuing or reissuing payment access. Restrict payment issuance and administration to the minimum necessary privileges.
PCI DSS v4.0	7.2.1 — Restrict access by business need to know	Payment access expansion still needs least-privilege controls around card and payment data.
Recommendation — Limit payment-system access to roles with a clear business need.
ISO/IEC 27001:2022	A.5.15 — Access control	Identity-linked payment issuance requires controlled access to enrollment and payment functions.
Recommendation — Define and enforce access rules for payment enrollment and disbursement systems.

Practitioner Guidance

What to prioritise: Design the payment path from the recipient outward, not the institution inward. The first test is whether a person can be enrolled, verified, paid, and able to spend the value through more than one channel without needing a bank branch.

What to verify: Confirm that the identity step is strong enough to prevent duplicate or misdirected issuance, but not so rigid that it excludes legitimate recipients who lack conventional bank credentials. Also verify that merchant acceptance, cash-out options, and support processes exist before volume scales.

Practitioner takeaway: The best inclusion model is the one that gives unbanked users multiple usable rails while keeping entitlement, fraud control, and recovery simple enough to operate at scale.