Driven by a lack of opportunity, 250 million migrant workers have left rural areas to take part in the country’s manufacturing boom. Often, even when they find work, their lives are just as defined by poverty and instability as those they left behind. Financial services are a key leverage point for individual economic mobility, yet banks are becoming scarce in rural areas. More than 30,000 branches in poor and rural regions have closed over the last few years, leaving more than 64 percent of these populations unbanked. Creating new, innovative access to savings accounts, loans, and other financial products could provide the opportunities and stability people need to improve their own futures.

Reboot undertook this study to develop and share a deep understanding of the daily lives of China’s marginalized. Our goal is to inform the development of new financial services that can tap into this immense potential market and, in doing so, greatly increase these populations’ access to economic opportunity and security. We focused on three marginalized groups of the Chinese population: 1) migrant workers; 2) rural villagers; 3) ethnic minorities.