Photo By: Julian
For millions of Americans, managing money has never been easier.
A check can be deposited with a smartphone camera. Bills can be paid automatically. Money can move between accounts in seconds, and a phone or smartwatch can replace the card that once replaced the checkbook. Over the past decade, financial technology has steadily removed friction from everyday transactions.
But convenience and accessibility are not necessarily the same thing.
Despite the rapid expansion of digital financial services, millions of American households remain outside the traditional banking system or continue to depend on financial services beyond it. According to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s 2023 National Survey of Unbanked and Underbanked Households, 4.2% of U.S. households, representing approximately 5.6 million households, did not have a checking or savings account at a bank or credit union. Another 14.2%, or roughly 19 million households, were considered underbanked.
Those numbers expose one of the challenges facing the next generation of fintech: innovation can make finance more efficient without necessarily making it equally accessible.
Financial Access Is More Complicated Than Having a Bank Account
The divide is not simply between people who have bank accounts and people who do not.
The FDIC defines underbanked households as those that have a checking or savings account but also used certain non-bank financial services during the previous year. Those services can include check cashing, money orders, international remittances and alternative forms of credit.
That distinction matters because access to a bank account does not automatically eliminate the financial needs that exist around it.
A consumer may have an account but still need to turn physical cash into digital funds. Someone may need to send money internationally, cash a check or pay a bill without making a separate trip to a bank branch. Others may live or work in communities where convenient access to traditional financial institutions is limited.
Even among the 5.6 million households that were completely unbanked in the FDIC survey, financial behavior was not uniform. About two-thirds relied entirely on cash, while the remainder combined cash with prepaid cards or non-bank online payment services.
The accessibility question, then, is becoming broader than whether someone can open an account. It increasingly includes whether consumers can reach and use financial services conveniently, affordably and in the forms that fit their lives.
Digital Finance Still Has a Physical Side
At the same time, consumer behavior complicates the idea that the future of money will simply become cashless.
The Federal Reserve’s 2026 Diary of Consumer Payment Choice found that cash accounted for 14% of consumer payments and remained the third-most-used payment method behind credit and debit cards. Four out of five consumers had used cash during the previous 30 days, and 90% said they planned to continue using it in the future.
Cash usage is also not distributed evenly. Adults 55 and older averaged 10 cash payments per month, compared with two among consumers ages 18 to 24. Rural consumers averaged nine monthly cash payments, compared with six among both urban and suburban consumers. Americans in households earning less than $25,000 annually also used cash more frequently than those in households earning more than $150,000.
That does not mean digital payments are retreating. It suggests something more nuanced: different consumers use different financial tools for different purposes.
The challenge for fintech may therefore be less about replacing one form of money with another and more about making it easier for consumers to move between them.
Bringing Financial Services Closer to Consumers
Where consumers access financial services is changing alongside how they pay.
Nearly half of banked households in the FDIC survey used mobile banking as their primary method of accessing their accounts. Over the previous decade, mobile banking as a primary access method increased almost ninefold, while reliance on bank tellers declined by more than half.
That shift raises another question for financial accessibility: if the traditional branch becomes less central to everyday banking, where should services that still require a physical touchpoint live?
Increasingly, one answer may be the places consumers already visit.
Retail stores, convenience locations and other community businesses can potentially serve as access points connecting digital financial systems with physical transactions. Instead of requiring a dedicated trip to a financial institution, consumers could encounter financial infrastructure alongside their normal routines.
PointsKash, under CEO and President Michael Herron, is among one of the fintech companies pursuing this model. Through its KashPoint kiosks, the company is developing self-service financial hubs for retail environments that are intended to connect services involving cash and digital finance within a single physical access point.
“As more of our financial lives move beyond the traditional bank branch, access and convenience are becoming just as important as the financial services themselves,” said Herron. “Consumers increasingly expect to manage their money where they already live, work and shop, rather than making a separate trip to a bank for every transaction.”
Herron sees the evolution as an extension of existing financial infrastructure rather than an attempt to eliminate it.
“The future of financial services isn’t about eliminating banks—it’s about extending financial access beyond the bank branch and meeting consumers where they already are,” he said.
The Next Fintech Race May Be About Access
For much of fintech’s rise, innovation has been measured by speed and simplicity.
Can a payment happen faster? Can an account be opened with fewer steps? Can a transaction that once required a physical visit happen from a smartphone?
Those advances have fundamentally changed finance. But the persistence of cash, non-bank financial services and millions of unbanked and underbanked households suggests there is another dimension to the industry’s next phase.
Financial technology must work not only for consumers who are already fully digital, but also for those who move between cash and digital payments, those who need physical access points and those whose financial lives do not fit neatly inside a single platform.
That makes accessibility an infrastructure problem as much as a technology problem.
The future of finance is likely to become more digital. But becoming more digital does not require abandoning the physical systems that millions of consumers still use. The more consequential question may be whether those two worlds can work together seamlessly.
The strongest financial infrastructure may ultimately be the kind consumers barely notice: accessible when they need it, available where they already are and flexible enough to let them choose how they manage their money.
