Financial access and insurance: a preliminary description of factors that affect immigrants

Providing financial services to immigrants is a growing business for bankers, and a growing area of study for policymakers and researchers. While still an emerging field, most of the attention to financial access thus far has tended to focus on core banking products such as bank account ownership, mortgage loans, and services that immigrants tend to use more often than native-born, such as wire transfers, that banks must market more aggressively than in the past to attract (some) immigrant groups. Insurance is another financial tool that, like accounts and mortgages, helps households accumulate and maintain assets, deal with unexpected financial contingencies, avoid a bad credit rating (a common result, after a medical crisis, among households having inadequate or no health insurance), and otherwise have an opportunity to participate in the financial mainstream. Yet insurance has received comparatively little attention in discussions about immigrants who do not or cannot take full advantage of common financial products and services. As is the case with many other financial products, proportionately fewer immigrants have property/casualty, life or health insurance than the native-born.