The Unbankable are the most important people for Self-Sovereign Identity and part of the reason for it’s invention. Globally, 69 percent of adults have an account, up from 62 percent in 2014 and 51 percent in 2011. However about 1.7 billion adults remain unbanked — without an account at a financial institution or through a mobile money provider.
Because economically challenged regions and towns in Africa have among the world’s lowest savings rate, local banks have little capital to lend to people and businesses to develop and grow productive enterprises.
To remedy this lack of financially driven activity, some Banks, have been encouraging financial institutions to come up with initiatives to bring the currently unbanked citizens into the banking system.
According to the Bank of Zambia for example over 60 % of the population is unbanked and altogether 80% of Africa is Unbanked, according to a Banking Conference in Johannesburg in 2016
Unbankable Causes
Some reasons a person might not have a bank account include:
- Lack of access via a nearby bank branch or mobile phone
- Minimum balance fees
- Distrust of the banking system
- No access to government-issued ID, which is required to open a bank account
The U.S. Federal Reserve estimated there are 55 million unbanked or underbanked adult Americans in 2018, which account for 22 percent of U.S. households.
Ending Unbankable Causes
Self-sovereign Identity is the first step ion ending reasons for anyone to be unbankable, that’s not to say that many of those may have no use for an account and/or need for money. However, there’s no reason why every individual on earth should be denied the right to have free access to whatever financial resources that my be entitled.
Youth are the primary beneficiaries of new systems and more information and with more information comes more progress, and with progress comes prosperity and with prosperity comes the need for bank accounts.
Self-Sovereign Identity and the Unbankable
Until every last person that wants/needs self-sovereign has been provided this basic common utilitarian process, the mandate is not complete and the SSI system is also not achieving it’s objective. It will eventually take less than 5 minutes to obtain SSI but not until after a billion have been collected.
Even the last person is as important as the first person, this is why we foresee there being a bounty for bringing in the names. Once people understand the value of this names, the race will be on and the greatest gold rush in human history will ensue.
The Unbankable and Self-sovereign Identity, is the Trillion Dollar Gold Rush.
Photo credit: Fujifilm User 9 on VisualHunt / CC BY-NC-SA
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