Volume 15 • Issue 1 • PP: 07–13 • 2027
Purpose-Specific Financial Analytics for Entrepreneurial Credit Market Screening
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© 2027 The Author(s). Published by ASPG. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
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A lender choosing markets for small-enterprise finance may use account ownership as a shortcut for credit demand. This article asks whether that shortcut identifies places where adults report borrowing to start or operate a business. We analyze the 2024 country estimates in the World Bank’s Global Findex Database 2025: 98 economies with complete business borrowing, account, formal-channel borrowing and formal saving measures. Account ownership and business borrowing are negatively associated across those economies (Spearman ρ = −0.220). An account-only model has a leave-one-economy-out mean absolute error of 5.529 percentage points, close to a constant forecast (5.580); adding formal-channel borrowing barely changes it. Adding formal saving reduces error to 4.700 points, although individual country errors remain substantial. Fifteen economies fall simultaneously above the sample’s upper quartile of business borrowing and below its median account ownership. In 40 economies with paired gender estimates, men have higher business borrowing in 19 and women in 21; account gender gaps do not reproduce a uniform enterprise-credit gap. These are country-level diagnostics of reported borrowing, not loan applications, unmet credit demand or evidence that account access causes enterprise borrowing. A staged market screen should therefore use purpose-specific borrowing and validate borrower quality and local lending rules before capital allocation.
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