Can Financialisation Counteract Banking Exclusion? A Study on the Example of the European Union Member States

The purpose of the article is to assess the relationship between financialization and banking exclusion. The research hypothesis that financialization contributes to the reduction of financial exclusion was also verified. The research was based on an analysis of the variables describing financialization and banking exclusion of 27 European Union countries in the 2014–2021 period. The zero-unitarization method and Pearson’s correlation coefficient were used. The results of the study indicate that a high degree of financialization is found in Croatia, Greece, Cyprus and Portugal. In contrast, the level of banking exclusion is the highest in Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands and Latvia. An examination of the correlation between the indicators for each year from research period is negative, but the research of correlations of the mentioned indicators for each country is not unambiguous. For some countries the relationship is negative, for other it is positive.