Financial Exclusion in France: An Implicit Interpretation of Banking Business Models

According to the World Bank, bank exclusion affects 2.5 billion inhabitants. Economic literature on the subject deals essentially with the characteristics of those excluded from banking services (age, gender, education…) but gives few details about the specifics of the banking system that might be the source of exclusion. In this article, we propose to study bank exclusion in France, 30 years after the introduction of the entitlement to basic banking services, by analysing the business models of the main banks. We show that these models are still selective and conducive to the exclusion of persons who have little self-sufficiency and/or limited financial resources, i.e. almost 10% of French households.