At Alliance CBX’s inaugural session in June, New Financial partner Yasmine Chinwala OBE walked us through ten years of data behind the UK’s Women in Finance Charter. The Charter began in 2016 as part of government-backed push to improve gender diversity at the senior levels of financial services firms. Since then, more than 400 signatories covering roughly 1.1 million UK employees––effectively the whole sector––have voluntarily signed up.
HM Treasury’s 2025 Annual Review, published this spring, shows steady progress: across signatories, average female representation in senior management rose from 27% at launch to 37% in 2025, growing steadily by one-percentage-point per year. Insurers became the first of the four largest sectors to reach 40%. Global and investment banks trail furthest behind, averaging just 30% representation. Interestingly, UK banks, once the sector leading the charge, have plateaued at 38% since 2022.
The reality is that without strong commitments and continued action, progress on women in leadership tends to stall or backslide. When asked whether their improvements would have happened without being a signatory, “nearly three quarters” said the Charter helped them get there, while just 27% thought they’d have arrived at the same place anyway.
A few lessons Chinwala drew out are worth noting as we encourage other countries to adopt similar initiatives and financial services providers to make these kinds of commitments:
- Accountability needs an owner
The Charter rests on four commitments: name an accountable executive (the “conscience of the Charter”), set an internal target, report progress publicly every year, and link senior pay to delivery against that target. This fourth element is the most controversial but arguably the most important. It recognizes that getting any business strategy done requires accountability, and the surest way of building it is tying results to compensation.
Many Alliance members have integrated the same principles to their workforce gender diversity and inclusion strategies. Data from the 2025 Female Economy Analytics survey shows that 35% of members tie executive compensation to gender performance targets, and 61% track their gender pay gap.
- Visibility changes behavior
Making data publicly available enables benchmarking and Chinwala was candid about why this matters as much as the target itself: once a sector starts moving, “nobody wants to be the bank sitting at 27% when the cohort hits 40%.” Seeing where your peers stand turns an abstract commitment into a competitive one.
The same dynamic is playing out elsewhere right now: the Irish government mandates all private and public companies with 50 or more employees to publish their mean and median hourly pay gaps, bonus differences and the percentages of employees receiving bonuses. Employers must also publish the report on their official websites and are required to upload their figures to the official government website PayGap.ie. According to the Minister for Children, Disability and Equality, Norma Foley stating that “this publicly available information on the Gender Pay Gap Portal will encourage employers to meet their legal obligation to report on their gender pay gaps.”
That is the logic behind our own Female Economy Analytics survey. The aggregate report (Measuring the Value of the Female Economy) establishes global and regional benchmarks, while individual benchmarking reports give members a sense of where they stand against peers.
- Progress takes time to embed
Asked how targets evolved over the Charter’s first decade, Chinwala described a maturing process: companies set rough targets early on, then refined them based on their data––and as they better understood how to improve women’s representation in leadership.
That know-how was created because each member report on actions taken and the most common actions are compiled in the Annual Review, so firms can see what is effective. Women Employee Resource Groups and D&I councils, for example, are now the most common culture lever, implemented by half of all signatories, while roughly one-third track their D&I progress through data dashboards.
Similarly, individual institutions seem to recognize the benefits of the Charter commitments more over time. In 2020, just 49% of those that linked gender targets to compensation believed it was an effective approach; by 2025, that share grew to 75%.
The Bottom Line
It’s essential to maintain focus on closing the gender gap in financial services leadership––not only for the sake of diversity itself, but also because increasing women’s representation in the C-Suite is key to winning Women’s Markets. The Alliance Annual Report shows that women’s share of customers has grown from 39% in 2020 to 45% 2024. Women’s representation in senior management grew from 33% to 44% in the same period, while their share of board seats grew from 25% to 35%.
Whether the commitment is to who sits in the boardroom or who a bank chooses to lend to, it’s worth remembering that both run on the same fuel: an owner, a target, and consistent reporting.
We will keep exploring models and policies that aim to make the financial services sector more inclusive in our Alliance Central Bank Exchange (CBX). The next two sessions focus on providing non-financial services to female entrepreneurs at scale. On June 23, we heard from Emma Wheeler, Head Women’s Wealth, Strategic Clients, UBS Global Wealth, and co-founder of the UK’s Investing in Women Hub, a one-stop-shop portal for women entrepreneurs. A third session, on July 26, will focus mentoring, featuring the founder of Digital Boost, a UK-based digital platform that has reached 30,000 MSMEs with 5,000 mentors.
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The Alliance Central Bank Exchange (Alliance CBX) is a new initiative designed to strengthen dialogue and practical collaboration between central banks and the financial sector on advancing women’s financial inclusion.
The Alliance CBX was developed in response to discussions with central bank leaders about the importance of creating stronger mechanisms for peer learning, public-private exchange, and sharing practical approaches to accelerate inclusive financial systems.
The initiative launched in June 2026, bringing together policymakers, APEX organizations, and private-sector leaders to explore innovations that work to expand opportunities for women entrepreneurs and women consumers of financial services.
If you are a Central Bank stakeholder or policy maker and are interested in joining the group, please email:Karyl.akilian@financialallianceforwomen.org
