Tokenization: How True Is the Promise of Financial Inclusion?
On March 17, 2026, the World Economic Forum published an article exploring how tokenization might impact credit growth, especially in emerging markets.
March 17, 2026
The World Economic Forum recently published an article discussing how tokenization could affect credit growth, particularly in emerging markets.
While it might sound a bit technical, it’s really about something quite simple:
The challenge small businesses in emerging markets face in accessing cash flow/liquidity and how tokenization might change that.
Globally, 79% of adults now have a bank account. That’s a pretty big step forward in terms of financial access. (I mentioned a few articles back that over a billion people still don’t have regular internet access, though.)
But having an account doesn’t mean having access to capital. Unfortunately, 70% of SMEs in developing markets can’t get the financing they need. The official financing gap stands at $5.2 trillion. The issue isn’t really about how trustworthy these businesses are; it’s more about the limited local capital or the difficulties in distributing the existing capital. If there’s no liquidity in the country, or if it’s scarce, credit doesn’t flow.
Tokenization offers a promising infrastructure to change this setup. It’s not just about stocks, bonds, and securities; a business’s receivables can also be represented on the blockchain. This way, they don’t have to wait on local balance sheets and can directly connect to global liquidity pools through the stablecoin infrastructure I’ve written about at length.
There’s even a concrete example from 2025. ABHI Middle East launched the MENAP region’s first live RWA private credit product on ZIGChain.
Global stablecoin liquidity directly met short-term SME receivables. I know ZIGChain places a lot of emphasis on tokenization, but the core of this credit model is about local producers getting a direct share of global liquidity without intermediaries. It’s about using tokenization to support access equality. There’s no Swift money transfer, no correspondent bank, no forex desk between a Pakistani SME and a Tokyo investor.
If the system works this way, true inclusion is possible. The tokenized asset market is moving in this direction, it has grown fivefold since 2022.
But will the system work this way?
As the on-chain RWA market grows, where will this liquidity flow? When that much-anticipated big wave of tokenization arrives, will it favor corporate bonds, large real estate funds, or models like the one ZIGChain has implemented, connecting local producers to global liquidity?
Historically, financial infrastructures have generally worked in favor of the big players first. Will blockchain be any different?
The WEF calls this “financial inclusion,” and I agree. But when I see that term, I think of the different examples of inclusion Acemoğlu and Robinson gave years ago in “Why Nations Fail.” They showed how some inclusive institutions or infrastructures stopped being inclusive due to certain approaches. The same question applies here: Under whose terms and through whose infrastructure will this inclusion come?
A few weeks back, I wrote that financial freedom isn’t just about owning assets; it’s about managing risk.
Tokenization and the term “financial inclusion” add a new dimension to that discussion.
Having an account isn’t enough, and accessing capital isn’t enough, people who have ideas, who produce, who create local value need to truly get a share of that global liquidity.
If examples like ZIGChain multiply, tokenization could be genuinely transformative. If not, liquidity will just pool in familiar hands, only a bit faster this time.
As new technologies and infrastructures make their way into our lives, the decisions on how and for what purposes these infrastructures will be used are crucial. Have we learned our lessons on this? (Think about the internet, social media, and now we’re following AI…)
📎 WEF, Tokenization and Emerging Markets: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2026/03/tokenizing-medium-small-business/
📎 WEF, Digital Assets in 2026: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2026/01/digital-economy-inflection-point-what-to-expect-for-digital-assets-in-2026/