What the new World Bank evidence actually shows
The World Bank’s All About Finance research note, drawing on enterprise-survey and B-READY data covering nearly 50,000 firms across 101 economies surveyed since 2021, isolates a measurable effect: firms that accept digital payments report fewer credit-access problems than otherwise similar firms that do not. The effect is not marginal. It is largest exactly where conventional financial information is weakest — in economies with thin credit registries, large informal sectors, and limited collateral frameworks.
The Findex 2025 release adds the volume context. In 2024, 79% of adults globally and 75% in low- and middle-income economies held a financial account, up from 51% and 42% in 2011 respectively. Sixty-two percent of adults in low- and middle-income economies — about 82% of account holders — made or received at least one digital payment in 2024, a 27-percentage-point jump from 2014. Digital merchant payments grew to 42% of adults in 2024, up from 35% in 2021. Those flows are no longer marginal channels; they are becoming the default.
For lenders, that volume creates something they did not have before: a continuous, hard-to-fake record of business activity. Every card payment, mobile-money receipt, QR-code purchase, or account-to-account settlement is timestamped against a known account. Stitching those records into a cash-flow profile is a different exercise than reviewing a self-reported revenue claim, and it is one machine-learning underwriting models can do at scale.
The biggest benefits appear where frictions are highest
The World Bank study finds the relationship is strongest for the firms that lenders historically struggle to assess: smaller, younger, less productive, and businesses without audited financial statements. Hesfintech market data echoes the operational change — AI-powered credit assessment tools have shortened SME decision-making time by 48%, and digital lending platforms now report 11% lower default rates than legacy underwriting. Peer-to-peer SME credit issuance crossed $28 billion in 2025 according to the same dataset, and 45% of global SME banking providers offer end-to-end digital onboarding.
In practical terms, a small merchant who switches from cash to a payment terminal does two things at once. They modernize checkout, and they begin building a usable financial history. Twelve to eighteen months of clean transaction data is often enough for a fintech lender to extend a working-capital line, an invoice advance, or a merchant cash advance — products that would have required collateral or audited statements under traditional underwriting. The merchant did not become more creditworthy. They became more legible.
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This gives payments policy a broader development role
If payment systems can help unlock credit, payment policy stops being a narrow technical agenda. Merchant onboarding rules, interoperability mandates between wallets and card networks, transaction-data governance, and consent frameworks all become indirect levers on credit availability. The EU’s PSD3 work, India’s Account Aggregator framework, and the African Union’s PAPSS settlement layer are all early templates for this combined design.
Three policy choices matter most. First, who owns the merchant’s transaction record — the payment processor, the bank, or the merchant themselves? The Account Aggregator model in India has shown that giving the firm portable consent rights expands the pool of lenders willing to compete for their business. Second, can a non-bank lender access the same payment-data feeds as the merchant’s primary bank, or does the bank get a structural moat? Open-banking rules answer that question. Third, what privacy and anti-fraud guardrails apply when payment processors begin marketing risk scores back to the firm’s customers and competitors?
Payment providers themselves are responding to the new frame. Stripe Capital, Square Capital, MercadoLibre’s lending arm, M-PESA’s Fuliza overdraft, and a wave of African mobile-money issuers now bundle credit on top of payment volume — the model where a payment relationship is the underwriting input. Banks that treat their payment processing as a low-margin commodity risk losing the data layer to whichever provider is paying attention.
That makes digital payments one of the more underrated pieces of economic infrastructure in 2026. Their value extends well beyond checkout speed. They are quietly becoming part of the information architecture that determines which firms can access capital and which remain financially constrained.
What Fintech Lenders and Payment Operators Should Do About It
The World Bank’s evidence is actionable. The firms that close the data gap between payment activity and credit assessment earliest will capture the SME lending segment that conventional banks have historically left underserved. The three moves below are each available today without regulatory invention.
1. Build the Cash-Flow Profile Product, Not the Score
The dominant credit-scoring paradigm — a single number summarising historical payment behaviour — is the wrong unit for SME underwriting on digital-payment data. Hesfintech’s market analysis confirms that AI-powered credit tools using transaction streams rather than static bureau scores have shortened SME decision time by 48 percent and reduced default rates by roughly 11 percent. The product to build is a cash-flow profile: 12 months of transaction patterns broken into seasonality, customer concentration, payment timing, and average ticket trends. That profile is understandable to a loan officer, legible to a regulator, and specific enough that a merchant can contest an inaccuracy. Stripe Capital and Square Capital both surface this profile to merchants before offering a working-capital line — which is why their acceptance rates and default rates outperform legacy scoring models in the same merchant cohorts.
2. Negotiate Data Portability Before the Regulator Mandates It
The Account Aggregator framework in India gave merchants portable consent rights over their own transaction history, expanding the pool of lenders competing for their business by allowing non-bank lenders access to the same feeds. The EU’s PSD3 equivalent provisions are currently in legislative drafting. Fintech lenders and payment processors operating in markets without open-banking mandates have a first-mover window to agree bilateral data-sharing arrangements with major payment processors — arrangements that give non-bank lenders comparable data access without waiting for a regulatory framework. Markets where banks retain exclusive access to payment data produce the structural moat that slows credit-market competition; challenging that moat through voluntary arrangements is faster than awaiting statutory intervention.
3. Design Merchant Onboarding as Credit Origination From Day One
Peer-to-peer SME credit issuance crossed $28 billion in 2025 and 45 percent of global SME banking providers now offer end-to-end digital onboarding — yet most onboarding flows are designed for payment acceptance, not credit origination. The merchant who switches from cash to a payment terminal does two things at once: they modernize checkout and they begin building a usable financial history. Redesign onboarding to collect the data fields that matter for underwriting from the first transaction: business category, typical order size, payment timing pattern, and customer recurrence rate. A merchant who has been active on a terminal for 12 months without a credit offer has been generating an underwriting file that the payment processor is not monetising. The OECD SME Financing Scoreboard 2026 flagged data fragmentation as the next bottleneck precisely because no one has yet closed this onboarding gap at scale.
Where the model still breaks
The data-as-credit thesis is not universal. The World Bank notes the effect weakens in markets with already mature credit bureaus, where digital-payment data adds little to existing underwriting signals. It also assumes regulators allow third-party access to payment records — markets where banks treat payment data as a captive asset see weaker pass-through to credit competition. And firms operating across multiple wallets, cash, and informal channels still produce fragmented data that no single processor can stitch together. The October 2025 OECD SME Financing Scoreboard 2026 flagged exactly that fragmentation as the next bottleneck. Solving it requires interoperability rules and merchant identity standards that most economies have not yet drafted, but Findex 2025 makes the underlying volume too large to ignore. The infrastructure question for the rest of the decade is whether payment systems graduate from utilities into legible, portable, regulated information layers — or stay locked behind whoever processes the transaction.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do digital payments help firms access credit?
Digital payments create consistent, timestamped records of revenue, customer activity, and payment timing. The World Bank’s 2026 cross-economy study found that effect reduces credit constraints most for the firms with the weakest paperwork — smaller, younger, and informal businesses.
Which firms benefit most from this effect?
The strongest gains appear among small, young, less productive firms and those without audited financial statements. AI-powered underwriting using digital-payment data has cut SME decision time by roughly 48% and reduced default rates by about 11% according to fintech market reports.
What should policymakers prioritize if they want payments to improve SME finance?
Three priorities: data portability and consent rights for merchants, fair access for non-bank lenders to payment-data feeds, and clear privacy guardrails. India’s Account Aggregator and the EU’s open-banking rules offer working templates.
