In the past three decades, there have been fundamental changes in the broad field of financial inclusion. From being an agenda that was driven from the supply side, that is, largely from the State with institutional, policy, and regulatory interventions, the field has now yielded sufficient space for the markets. After the implementation of the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana (PMJDY) in 2014, which aimed to give every household access to banking facilities, we are in a situation where the former Governor of Reserve Bank of India, Urjit Patel said: ‘My view about financial inclusion is probably, different from that of my predecessors. Going forward I see that the market will take over this agenda, through technology and innovation. The role of RBI will take a backseat’ (Sriram, 2018). It is in this context that we planned for a focused issue on financial inclusion. While this issue contains four articles representing diverse aspects of financial inclusion, there are more articles in the pipeline which we will be curating over the next few issues, including a roundtable on the technological innovations that make financial services accessible to the poor and the excluded.