Spotlight on: Women’s Leadership Matters
The latest data from members as reported in our Female Economy Analytics Survey 2025 shows that our members are not immune from prevailing anti-DEI winds out of DC. We saw a plateauing in representation of women in senior management and on boards in 2025, after five years of consistent growth. In the last 12 – 18 months alone we have seen two of our very large bank members in Europe, curtail or stop their Women’s Markets Programs. While the current zeitgeist has emboldened a push back, what is clear is that taking a strategic approach to Women’s Markets is not just about the business case, it is a strategic choice. A choice that a CEO makes, supported by a leadership team.
Women’s Leadership matters. Data from our members shows that women’s representation as customers correlates with women’s representation in senior management and on the boards. We need more women in leadership positions in financial services if we are to have greater women’s financial inclusion.
Supporting our members to build the pipeline of women leaders is a critical part of our work. We created the seminal How To Guide To Becoming The Employer Of Choice For Women with inputs from 15 members and support from Mercer. This provides the roadmap and includes use cases and tools our members developed throughout. Recently we published a Case Study on Bank Al Etihad that traces their journey from ensuring workforce gender diversity, equity and inclusion to being the financial services provider of choice for women in Jordan. We have several other case studies on workforce DEI including from HBL Pakistan and Westpac Australia. Our website is rich in these kinds of resources, and we encourage you to explore it.
In other news, last month we were invited by the Private Sector Foundation Uganda (PSFU), an apex organization and one of our members in Uganda, to train the sector on our methodology for serving women in business. This Women’s Markets Playbook training is a truncated version of our All Stars Academy and is available to non-members, unlike the All Stars. Thirty-one institutions attended and the positive feedback and energy throughout was excellent.
Next month we bring a new training to our members, the Gender-Inclusive SME Banking Toolkit. This four-part learning program is designed to help financial institutions move from understanding the women-owned/led SME market opportunity to putting their strategy into action. Built on the INVEST Toolkit, it combines practical tools and structured peer learning to help participants assess their market, refine their customer segmentation, evaluate their capabilities, strengthen their business case, and track their performance.
Exclusive to Alliance members, participants will learn directly from the ConsumerCentriX practitioners who developed the INVEST Toolkit and Women’s Markets experts from the Financial Alliance for Women, while exchanging experiences with peers from the Alliance’s global network.
Our latest Ask The Expert session looked at how AI is supporting more women to come through the sales funnel by reducing friction during KYC and using better data to enable fairer underwriting of loans to women customers. And our next Employee Value Proposition Taskforce session focuses on supporting a neurodivergent workforce, requiring us to move past basic awareness into genuine inclusion across hiring, daily management, and workplace design. Taking place October 8, members from EMEA and Africa will share their perspectives.
On October 15 at 10 AM EST/3 PM GMT we will reveal the winners of our annual Champions of the Female Economy Awards. The event will be live streamed on YouTube so that members, partners and the public can tune in. The live stream link will be shared shortly before the event.
To qualify for an award, members must have submitted their annual performance data to the Alliance and winners are selected based on quantifiable metrics, year-over-year growth, and comparison to national benchmarks.
We’d love for you to join us as we celebrate this year’s winners.
Last but not least, this month we speak with Telma Sevilla from member Banco Fichosa about their lessons learned from building a strong Women’s Markets program over the past 5 years.
Thank you so much to all our members who continue to innovate and to inspire each other and the industry. Together we are building a fully inclusive financial services sector.
In community,
