The Framing Problem
The word 'unbanked' carries an implicit assumption: that being without a bank account is the defining feature of financial exclusion, and that the solution is to get people into banks. This assumption was never entirely accurate. It is now, in much of the Pacific, actively misleading. In Fiji, the unbanked rate has fallen from 45% in 2010 to approximately 6% today — not because banks expanded, but because mobile money arrived. The hundreds of thousands of Fijians who now have a formal financial identity obtained it through their mobile phones, not through a bank branch. Their financial services provider is a telecommunications company. Their account is a mobile wallet. And their payment network is a combination of QR codes, USSD menus, and increasingly, a Mastercard-enabled debit card. If we define 'banked' as having a bank account, many of these people are still technically unbanked. But if we define it as having meaningful access to formal financial services, they are very firmly included.
What Mobile Money Has Already Done
Across the Pacific, approximately nine mobile money services are operating in six countries. The UNCDF's Pacific Financial Inclusion Programme has documented the impact rigorously — not just registration numbers, but genuine utility: the market vendor who uses her wallet balance to restock inventory, the seasonal worker's wife who can receive money without making a half-day journey to a town, the small business owner who can accept payment from customers who left their cash at home. M-PAiSA in Fiji processes over FJ$3 billion in annual transactions. It has been integrated into Fiji's National Payment System. It issues Mastercard-branded cards that can be used at 100 million merchants worldwide. It has reduced the unbanked rate by nearly 40 percentage points in 15 years. This is not a pilot programme. It is a functioning, scaled financial system that has transformed the economic lives of hundreds of thousands of people. The question is why the development community is still writing strategy documents about financial inclusion in the Pacific as if the foundational work has not been done.
Why the Development Community Is Behind
The gap between what practitioners have built and what the development community is funding is partly a product of evaluation timelines. Donor-funded programmes operate on 3-5 year cycles. Genuine infrastructure transformation — the kind that changes 40 percentage points of a population's financial status — takes 10-15 years and requires sustained commitment beyond what any single donor cycle can sustain. It is also partly a measurement problem. The metrics that donors use — account registration rates — are both easy to collect and easy to game. Operators funded to open accounts will open accounts, whether or not those accounts are subsequently used. And it is partly a knowledge transfer problem. The practitioners who actually built mobile money in the Pacific — the product managers, the compliance officers, the agent network coordinators, the central bank liaisons — are not the people writing the policy papers. Their knowledge is embedded in operational experience, not in published literature.
The Real Remaining Challenges
None of this means the Pacific's financial inclusion work is done. The real remaining challenges are more specific than the generic unbanked framing suggests. Papua New Guinea, with a population of over 10 million and an estimated 80% unbanked rate, remains the Pacific's most significant challenge — and one that is orders of magnitude harder than Fiji, given the terrain, the infrastructure deficits, and the regulatory complexity. The outer islands of every Pacific nation remain systematically underserved. Agent networks that work well in peri-urban Fiji do not automatically work on a remote island with no reliable electricity and two supply ships a month. Credit and insurance products remain almost entirely absent from Pacific mobile money ecosystems. Having a transaction account is one thing. Having access to credit that can smooth income shocks, or insurance that can protect against the cyclones and floods that Pacific communities face with increasing frequency, is a different and harder problem.
What This Means for Policy
For Australia, the implication is straightforward: stop funding financial inclusion programmes as if mobile money is an experiment and start treating it as infrastructure. Australia's development assistance in the Pacific should be directed at the hard remaining problems — PNG's financial exclusion, outer island connectivity, credit and insurance product development — rather than at repeating the foundational mobile money work that has already been done in Fiji, Samoa, and Vanuatu. This means working with experienced Pacific FinTech practitioners who have already solved the foundational problems, rather than beginning each new programme from first principles. It means funding operational scale rather than pilot projects. And it means measuring success by outcomes that matter — active use, transaction diversity, credit access — rather than the account registration numbers that have historically defined success in this sector.