The International Monetary Fund (IMF) recently released its 2025 Financial Access Survey (FAS) results, a dataset that includes annual statistics on financial service access and usage, covering figures for the year 2024. In figures, Tunisia ranked first amongst covered Arab countries in terms of commercial bank branches per 100,000 (100K) adults at end of year 2024 with a reading of 22.4 followed by Morocco (20.2 branches) and Lebanon (15.9 branches), bearing in mind that Lebanon occupied the first place amongst Arab countries prior to the year 2020, i.e. before the onset of the financial crisis. In addition, the FAS results showed that while Bahrain, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia ranked 4^th, 7^th and 9^th among Arab countries in terms of branches per 100K adults, the performance of said GCC countries was much better in terms of relative electronic banking benchmarks (ATMs, debit cards and mobile & internet banking transactions) highlighting the shift to digital banking. In figures, Kuwait ranked first in terms of ATMs per 100K adults in 2024 with a reading of 58.0, followed by Saudi Arabia (56.1) and Egypt (37.1), with Lebanon ranking 6^th (pre-crisis ranking of 5) with a reading of 32.9. Saudi Arabia occupied the first place among Arab countries in terms of debit cards per 1,000 (1K) adults with a reading of 1,867.0, followed by Bahrain (1,722.6 per 1K adults) and Kuwait (1,249.8 per 1K adults), with Lebanon ranking 8^th (pre-crisis ranking of 6) with a reading of 276.3 debit cards per 1K adults. Saudi Arabia also outperformed its Arab peers in terms of mobile & internet transactions with a level of 104,483.1 transactions per 1K adults during the year 2024, way ahead of Bahrain (21,929.4) which ranked second and Djibouti (17,971.3) which ranked third. Lebanon, however, bottomed the list (pre-crisis ranking not comparative due to lack of available data for several Arab countries) with 1,320.1 transactions per 1K adults. 

The below table highlights the detrimental impact of the crisis on the Lebanese banking sector with the number of commercial bank branches and ATMs per 100K adults dropping by ~40% & ~31% since the start of the crisis to 15.9 and 32.9 respectively from 26.5 and 47.9 pre-crisis. Banks were compelled to scale down in terms of branch network and ATMs in order to cut down on rent and other operating expenses, yet the impact on the ATM network was less pronounced due to their lower associated costs. In parallel, banks started making the shift to providing cheaper and user-friendly e-banking services, which explains the steady rise (32.1%) in mobile & internet banking transactions per 1K adults between the years 2022 and 2024 to around 1,320.