Democratizing Finance

Since the late twentieth century, banks and insurance companies have grown rapidly and consolidated so that financial markets are dominated by fewer and bigger players. Marion Laboure and Nicolas Deffrennes argue that this trend has made access to financial services, especially high-quality financial services, harder for people with low and middle incomes in developed countries, exacerbating inequality. In developing countries, meanwhile, access to any services at all remains difficult for hundreds of millions of people. The authors argue that the rise of new technologies promises to make access easier around the world--