Financial health is rising on global policy agendas — from G20 summits to UN conferences — as countries confront economic volatility and growing household vulnerability. In 2024, financial health was spotlighted by the G20’s Global Partnership on Financial Inclusion (GPFI) and referenced in the UN’s Financing for Development Outcome Document, signaling broader recognition of its role in inclusive economic growth and household resilience.
As momentum builds, so too does the need for better measurement. Development priorities cannot be effectively pursued without a clear understanding of what progress looks like in people’s lives – and how to track it. Yet, when it comes to financial health, the global community is still in the early stages of developing consistent and practical ways to measure it — particularly because it spans across diverse national contexts and private sector institutional actors.
Unlike other policy priorities, there is no widely accepted global consensus on how to measure financial health. Most efforts to date have been national or subnational. Countries like the USA, UK, Canada, and Mexico have launched dedicated financial health surveys, whilst others, such as Kenya, Rwanda, and Colombia, have included financial health modules within broader consumer financial surveys. Some banks, microfinance organizations, and fintechs are also developing surveys and metrics to understand their clients’ financial health.
Yet, national efforts remain fragmented, making it difficult to compare results and align public and private actors around shared outcomes. Financial health is notably missing from global surveys – with the Global Findex’s indicator related to financial resilience standing out as a significant exception.
A global lens on financial health
Measuring financial health is a complex task, and a necessary first step in the journey to measure it is to clearly define what the concept means. In 2024, the GPFI defined ‘financial well-being’ – widely accepted as synonymous with financial health – as encompassing people’s abilities to do four things, while bearing in mind country contexts:
- Manage their financial needs and obligations (the day-to-day)
- Pursue aspirations and goals, and capture opportunities (building tomorrow)
- Cope with financial shocks (being resilient)
- Feel satisfied and confident about their financial lives (confidence factor)
However, apart from using this definition to categorize a number of indicators already in use around the world, the GPFI stopped short of proposing a global measurement framework, reflecting recognition among its members of the importance of embedding measurement in local systems while promoting shared ambition on outcomes.
How the Global Findex 2025 takes up the challenge
Originally launched in 2011 to measure account ownership, the Findex has steadily evolved to offer deeper insights into how people actually use financial services. By asking how difficult it would be to raise emergency funds and where that money would come from, the Findex took an early and important step into the outcomes territory in 2014, helping us understand how financial services contribute to people’s resilience. However, until now, it has placed less emphasis on other dimensions of financial health.
The Findex 2025 takes an important step forward by expanding its lens to capture more dimensions of financial health, which is helping to address a critical data gap at the global level. It now touches on all four dimensions of financial health defined by the GPFI, to a varying degree.
Resilience remains the most extensively covered dimension. In line with earlier Findex waves, the 2025 Findex continues to ask whether adults could raise an emergency sum (equal to 5% of their country’s GNI per capita) within 30 days, and where they would turn for funds.
For the first time, the survey also asks how long people could continue covering household expenses if they lost their main source of income. It also probes further into health shocks, such as whether people borrowed for medical reasons, and it explores the financial fallout from climate events by asking whether people experienced natural disasters or extreme weather in the past three years and if this resulted in income loss or disrupted access to financial services.
The additional new questions in the latest Findex have also strengthened the dataset’s coverage of the other three GPFI-defined dimensions of financial health.
Unlike some national surveys, the Findex doesn’t ask directly whether people are able to manage their day-to-day expenses. But it offers clues. In 2025, it introduces two new questions aimed at capturing short-term money management behavior, providing insights into people’s abilities to meet their day-to-day needs. Firstly, it asks if people store money in an account to manage short-term expenses, and secondly, it asks when wages or government payments are deposited, do they withdraw the entire amount or leave some in the account?
Financial health isn’t just about surviving today; it’s about being in a position to face tomorrow’s goals, aspirations, and opportunities. On this forward-looking side, the Findex builds on the last wave by introducing new questions on borrowing to invest in a business, as well as repeating a question on saving for old age. For the first time, it also asked whether people have taken loans to invest in businesses, highlighting how credit can unlock new opportunities.
On the GPFI’s final dimension – the so-called ‘confidence factor’ – the 2025 Findex has questions on people’s financial worries, but offers limited coverage of this dimension beyond that.
Can we balance global benchmarks and local realities?
The 2025 Findex does not offer a complete global picture of financial health, but it does take a meaningful step forward. Its emergency funding questions, echoed in several national surveys, may be the closest we get to a globally applicable financial health indicator. Its strength lies in its ability to calibrate for local context (via GNI per capita) and the fact that it does not prescribe specific types of shocks.
Still, resilience is only one part of the picture, and the Findex’s coverage of the other three dimensions remains thinner. To go further would require not only adding additional questions to build more robust data across each of the GPFI’s dimensions of financial health, but also resolving the industry’s long-standing debate on whether a global approach can be adequately sensitive to local context. For example, what constitutes typical day-to-day expenses in Kenya will be different in Switzerland. This tension explains the GPFI’s 2024 decision not to propose a global standard, and it’s an area that still demands exploration.
Despite the challenges, there’s a growing consensus that progress on financial health measurement will depend on greater collaboration across stakeholders, including financial sector authorities, financial service providers, and researchers.
This means not only advancing demand-side surveys, but also experimenting with supply-side data. Administrative data from providers – on account usage, late payments, or savings balances – can offer real-time, low-cost insights into people’s wellbeing, and may serve as a valuable complement to survey-based tools, including those that flag concerns like over-indebtedness.
The Global Findex has shown that global benchmarking is possible, but also that its limits must be acknowledged. It shouldn’t carry the burden alone. Others are stepping in: the UNSGSA adopted financial health as a strategic priority in September 2024, and CGAP’s Financial Inclusion 2.0 initiative is actively working to advance this field by developing guidance for national financial sector authorities and the private sector on indicators to measure financial health.
