The G20's Financial Inclusion Targets and the Pacific: Where We Are, What's Missing

The G20 has made financial inclusion a global priority for two decades. The Pacific has made genuine progress. But measuring that progress against G20 and SDG benchmarks reveals persistent gaps — and a clear role for Australia in closing them.

Deepak Baran — Head of Financial Technology, Vodafone Fiji

Pacific FinTech Pulse · Article 08 · 6 April 2026 · 7 min read

G20Financial InclusionPacific

What the G20 Commitments Actually Say

The G20 has been making financial inclusion commitments since the Seoul Summit in 2010, when leaders endorsed the Financial Inclusion Action Plan and established the Global Partnership for Financial Inclusion. The commitments have evolved through successive G20 presidencies, but the core elements have remained consistent: universal access to transaction accounts, lower remittance costs, broader financial literacy, and stronger consumer protection. For the Pacific, two specific targets matter most. The SDG 10.c target — reducing remittance transaction costs to less than 3% by 2030 — directly addresses the 10.1% average cost that Pacific households currently pay to receive money from Australia. And the SDG 8.10 target — ensuring universal access to financial services — provides the framework for evaluating the Pacific's financial inclusion journey. Both targets are relevant. Neither is close to being met.

Pacific Progress Against the Targets

The news on Pacific financial inclusion is genuinely mixed. On the positive side, mobile money has transformed financial access in Fiji, Samoa, and increasingly in Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. The Pacific Financial Inclusion Programme, running from 2008 to 2020, provided financial education to over two million people and funded 44 projects with financial service providers. In Fiji specifically, the unbanked rate has fallen from 45% to approximately 6% — a transformation that compares favourably with almost any developing economy in the world. On the negative side, the outer islands of most Pacific nations remain significantly underserved. Papua New Guinea, with a population of over 10 million and one of the highest rates of financial exclusion in the Asia-Pacific, has seen much slower progress. Remittance costs across the region remain more than three times the SDG target. And the quality of financial services available to those who are nominally included varies enormously.

Where the Gaps Remain

The cost gap. At 10.1%, Australia-to-Pacific remittance costs are more than triple the SDG 10.c target. No amount of financial education closes this gap. It requires structural changes to the remittance market — specifically, the kind of digital infrastructure investment that makes low-cost digital transfer services viable. The PNG gap. Papua New Guinea is the Pacific's largest economy and its most financially excluded. With a population of over 10 million and an estimated 80% unbanked rate, PNG represents the Pacific's most significant financial inclusion challenge — and one that has not received proportionate attention. The quality gap. Many Pacific residents who are technically banked have access to services that are, in practice, barely functional — accounts with fees that exceed typical balances, limited merchant acceptance, and no credit or insurance products available.

The Measurement Problem

Part of the challenge with the G20's financial inclusion agenda in the Pacific is that the metrics that are easy to collect — account ownership rates — are also the least informative. An account opened for a donor disbursement and never used again looks identical in the data to an account used daily for payments, savings, and remittances. Better measurement would focus on active use rather than account ownership, on transaction diversity rather than registration rates, and on the affordability of services relative to local incomes. These metrics are harder to collect and less flattering to report — which is precisely why the development community defaults to account ownership figures. Australia, as a major funder of Pacific development programmes, has the leverage to push for better measurement standards. Tying aid disbursements to outcomes rather than outputs would shift the incentive structure for the entire sector.

Australia's Role in Pacific Financial Inclusion

Australia's $2.05 billion in Pacific development assistance in 2024-25 makes it the region's largest and most influential development partner. That financial weight comes with both responsibility and opportunity. The responsibility is to ensure that Australian development funding is directed toward financial inclusion interventions that actually work — that build durable infrastructure, that deliver measurable utility, and that are evaluated against honest metrics. The opportunity is to leverage Australia's own FinTech sector — among the most sophisticated in the Asia-Pacific — to build the Pacific's financial infrastructure in ways that create commercial value for Australian firms while delivering genuine development outcomes for Pacific communities. Those two goals are not in tension. They are mutually reinforcing.