The World Bank estimates that 1.4 billion adults globally remain unbanked without access to an account at a financial institution or through a mobile money provider. Alongside that figure sits another: in 2025, over 30 million savings group members collectively saved more than $11.5 billion. Group members see income grow an average of 275% within five years, are 50–60% less likely to face food shortages than non-members, and are up to 85% more likely to have savings available during emergencies. CARE International, which pioneered the VSLA model, reports a return of $18.85 for every $1 invested.
The more important question, however, is not how much savings groups have mobilized. It is how much of that activity is actually captured within the formal financial system. There is no widely agreed-upon estimate, and that absence is telling.
This is the visibility gap. People are actively saving, borrowing, and managing money. The economic behavior is consistent and demonstrably valuable. But much of it does not translate into access to broader financial opportunities because the financial system cannot see it.
Savings Groups Emerged to Fill a Structural Failure
For many underserved populations, particularly women, formal financial institutions have historically been inaccessible or misaligned with lived realities. Financial products often require collateral, stable income, or levels of financial literacy that exclude large segments of the population. Even where services exist, they rarely reflect the irregular cash flows and community-based financial practices that define everyday life.
In response, savings-led models such as Village Savings and Loan Associations (VSLAs), pioneered by CARE International in 1991, introduced a different approach. These models prioritize savings over debt, enabling members to build assets gradually, access small loans from pooled funds, and manage financial shocks collectively. As the broader role of savings groups in the financial ecosystem makes clear, these are not informal workarounds — they are deliberate, structured responses to market failure.
Over time, a growing body of research, including work from the World Bank and CGAP, has confirmed that savings groups improve financial resilience, support income-generating activities, and strengthen household-level economic stability. Members diversify livelihoods, invest in microenterprises, and smooth consumption across seasonal cycles.
The model works, and it works at scale. The challenge lies not in demonstrating its value, but in connecting it to a financial system not designed to recognize it.
The Challenge Begins at the Point of Transition
As members grow their businesses and expand their economic activities, their financial needs begin to outgrow the capacity of the group. At this stage, access to formal financial services becomes both relevant and necessary. However, this transition rarely happens smoothly.
Savings groups typically operate without standardized records, formal registration, or verifiable financial histories. Their activities are structured internally, but not in ways that are legible to banks, microfinance institutions, or insurers. This creates a disconnect between demonstrated financial behavior and recognized financial identity. Understanding this global access gap is essential to understanding why the transition point remains so difficult to navigate at scale.
What exists is a form of economic activity that is consistent and valuable but largely invisible.
Digitization as the Bridge Between Two Worlds
Digitization has increasingly been positioned as the bridge between informal and formal finance, and in many ways, it is already reshaping how savings groups operate.
By translating manual processes into digital formats, savings and loan activities can be recorded, stored, and analyzed over time. This improves transparency within groups, reduces calculation errors, and creates a persistent record of financial activity that does not disappear at the end of a cycle. More importantly, it introduces the possibility of a digital financial footprint that can be interpreted beyond the group itself. The case for why digitization matters for savings groups rests not only on operational efficiency, but on this downstream potential.
In practice, this often takes the form of digital ledger systems that mirror existing group workflows rather than replace them. Tools such as DreamSave, developed by DreamStart Labs, follow this approach — allowing groups to record savings contributions, track loans, manage meetings, and perform calculations within a single platform. The design reflects the realities of the users, including offline functionality and minimal device requirements, recognizing that many groups operate in low-connectivity environments and may only have access to a shared smartphone. By October 2025, DreamSave had recorded over 25 million transactions totalling more than $25 million across more than 40,000 groups and 800,000 members in 37 countries — figures that have continued to grow since.
Yet even at that scale, the reach of digitization efforts remains limited relative to the size of the problem. With 1.4 billion adults still outside the formal financial system, what has been achieved represents a meaningful but modest share of the population that savings-led models could ultimately serve. This context matters, because it shifts the central question from whether digital tools exist to whether they are being used consistently enough to generate the data that financial inclusion depends on.
As groups continue to use such tools over multiple cycles, their financial activities begin to form structured datasets. Patterns around savings consistency, loan repayment behavior, and group stability become visible. In contexts where traditional credit histories do not exist, this type of longitudinal group data begins to serve as a proxy for financial reliability.
The Presence of Digital Tools Does Not Automatically Resolve the Visibility Gap
One of the most consistent findings across digitization efforts is that onboarding does not guarantee sustained usage. Groups may adopt digital platforms initially, but without continued integration into their routines, usage declines over time. This results in fragmented or incomplete data, which limits the ability of financial institutions to rely on it for decision-making.
Evidence across the sector consistently shows that digital financial services only translate into meaningful inclusion when they are actively and consistently used — not simply accessed. This distinction is critical in the context of savings groups, where the value of digitization is directly tied to the continuity of records across cycles.
Implementing best practices for digitizing savings groups therefore extends well beyond tool design. The way digital platforms are introduced — whether as core components of group methodology or as optional add-ons — significantly influences whether they become embedded in everyday practice. NGOs, facilitators, and community-based organizations responsible for training and supporting savings groups play a decisive role here, often more so than the technology itself.
The conversation is therefore shifting, rightly, from access to adoption.
Financial Linkages: The Next Stage of Inclusion
This shift becomes even more important when considering financial linkages — the mechanisms through which savings groups connect to formal financial service providers such as microfinance institutions, banks, and insurers. These providers can offer products that go beyond the capacity of the group, including larger loans, insurance products, and other financial services that support business growth and long-term stability.
For these linkages to function, financial institutions need reliable data to assess risk. Sustained digital adoption is what generates that data.
DreamLink is designed as a bridge between savings groups and formal financial providers, using aggregated group-level data generated through DreamSave to inform eligibility assessments. Rather than relying on traditional collateral or individual credit scores — neither of which most savings group members possess — financial institutions can evaluate how groups perform collectively over time: how consistently they save, how reliably they repay loans, and how stable their financial behavior is across cycles.
These developments point to a broader shift in how creditworthiness is understood in low-income and informal contexts, moving from individual collateral to collective financial behavior. But they also reinforce a key dependency.
Without consistent and reliable data, financial linkages cannot scale. Without sustained usage of digital tools, that data cannot be generated. The chain is tight: digitization enables data, usage sustains data, and data enables access.
Where this chain most commonly breaks is not at the level of the technology itself. Digital tools designed for savings groups have demonstrated, across multiple contexts, that they can function effectively in low-resource environments — recording transactions accurately, operating offline, and integrating into existing group structures without significant disruption. The gap between onboarding and sustained usage is better understood as a foundational challenge: one rooted in the behavioral, organizational, and educational conditions that exist within groups before a digital tool is ever introduced.
This is where the role of NGOs, implementing partners, and organizations responsible for group formation and financial literacy training becomes critical — and where, arguably, more intentional strategy is needed. The transition from onboarding to active usage does not happen automatically. It requires that digital adoption be embedded within the training and methodology frameworks through which groups are established and supported. When financial education, group facilitation, and digital tool usage are treated as integrated rather than separate components of a group’s development, the conditions for sustained engagement are meaningfully stronger.
What the sector therefore requires is not better technology alone, but an ecosystem-level strategy that coordinates across technology providers, implementing organizations, and funders to address the behavioral and institutional conditions that determine whether digitization translates into the consistent data trail that financial inclusion ultimately depends on.
The Scale of What Remains
Digitization is a necessary step in bridging the gap between informal and formal financial systems, but it is not sufficient on its own. Without sustained usage, the data required to support financial linkages does not materialize at the level needed for scale. Without purposeful linkage infrastructure, even good data remains unused.
As a result, a substantial portion of the $11.5 billion mobilized by savings groups remains outside the reach of the formal financial system. Because it lacks visibility.
Closing that gap requires technology that works in the field, adoption strategies embedded in group methodology, and financial institutions willing to recognize collective behavior as a legitimate basis for credit. All three conditions must be met simultaneously. And with 1.4 billion people still outside the formal financial system, the urgency of meeting them has never been more apparent.
