Authors: Jamie Evans, Dr Daniel Tischer and Sara Davies
Funded by: University of Bristol School of Management’s Research Platform Funding and the Bristol Inclusive Economy Initiative
Published by: University of Bristol
Publication date: January 2020

This report builds on our earlier report in which we developed an index to measure geographical access to cash, using Bristol as a case study. The index – the Availability of Cash Index – highlighted the uneven nature of cash access across the city of Bristol, showing the importance of taking a geographical perspective to the issue of financial inclusion. Here, we build upon our work in Bristol, extending the Index in two ways:

1. We develop the Index to work across both urban and rural environments. To do this, we use a case study of a region in South Wales, from Port Talbot to Pontypridd, which incorporates both towns and rural landscapes.
2. We identify the most vulnerable areas – considering both their current ability to access cash and their residents’ ability to cope without such access. We do so through the construction of a measure of travel difficulty, indicating that a high proportion of residents in an area may find it difficult to travel far to access cash (or other essential services). This measure incorporates: levels of car ownership, disability, age, income and access to bus stops. These two additions allow us to not only map geographical access to cash across our case study in South Wales, but also identify those neighbourhoods that may have the highest need for intervention; for example, via protected status in LINK’s Financial Inclusion programme.