Financial Inclusion is, in many ways, a spatial planning issue: Where do financial institutions provide services, how far do customers travel to access mobile money, which services are available where and how is agent cash-flow handled? Utilising geodata can contribute significantly to measuring financial access and thus assist in improving Financial Inclusion by expanding the reach of services and locating areas of economic exclusion. This study presents a new Spatial Decision Support System, with a frontend embedded directly within a spreadsheet interface, that enables measuring and planning financial access through geospatial analysis and Earth Observation derived products. The purpose is to complement existing Financial Inclusion measures, which rely significantly on large-scale representative household surveys to quantify financial access and opportunity to proxy quality of inclusion. The Decision Support System relies on Earth Observation and Public Participatory GIS, which enables a decoupling from the census cycle and global reach. Our findings indicate that a geospatial approach to measuring and making decisions regarding the location of financial access points can positively affect both tracking and delivering Financial Inclusion and reducing the urban–rural service cliff-edge. Our proposed geospatial methodology is useful for decision-makers in two ways: a) It allows the measurement of the large-scale geospatial reach of financial services – useful for decision-makers, planners, politicians, national statistical offices, and NGOs in charge of tracking progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals. b) It helps with planning and optimising services for local financial entities such as mobile money agents, brick and mortar bank branches, and less formal saving mechanisms such as saving clubs. The Spatial Decision Support System is currently used by several Financial Service Providers in Ghana and undergoing implementation for one in North-western Tanzania.

金融包容在许多方面都是一个空间规划问题：金融机构在哪里提供服务，客户去多远才能获得移动货币，在哪里可以使用哪些服务以及如何处理代理人现金流量？利用地理数据可以极大地有助于衡量财务状况，从而通过扩大服务范围和确定经济排斥区域来帮助改善金融普惠性。这项研究提出了一个新的空间决策支持系统，其前端直接嵌入在电子表格界面中，该系统可以通过地理空间分析和地球观测衍生产品来测量和规划财务访问。目的是补充现有的“金融普惠”措施，这些项目在很大程度上依赖于大规模的有代表性的家庭调查，以量化财务渠道和机会，以衡量包容性。决策支持系统依赖于地球观测和公众参与GIS，可实现与人口普查周期和全球覆盖范围的分离。我们的发现表明，一种用于测量和决策有关金融接入点位置的地理空间方法可以对跟踪和交付金融普惠性以及减少城乡服务悬崖边缘产生积极影响。我们提出的地理空间方法对决策者有两种作用：a）它可以衡量金融服务的大规模地理空间范围–对决策者，规划者，政治人物，国家统计局，非政府组织负责跟踪实现可持续发展目标的进展。b）它有助于规划和优化针对本地金融实体的服务，例如移动货币代理，实体银行分支机构，以及非正式形式的储蓄机制，例如储蓄俱乐部。目前，加纳的多家金融服务提供商正在使用“空间决策支持系统”，坦桑尼亚西北部的一家金融服务提供商正在实施该决策。