Every year, the Financial Alliance for Women recognizes member institutions doing exceptional work to serve women customers, enable women entrepreneurs, close financial inclusion gaps, and advance gender equity within their organizations. The 2026 Champion of the Female Economy Awards are coming this October — and the clock is already ticking on eligibility. Members must submit the Female Economy Analytics Survey (FEAS) by June 18 to be considered.
Eight Categories, One Survey
This year’s awards span eight categories, representing the full spectrum of what it means to be a leader in the Female Economy. They include:
- Access to Finance Champion — Honors financial institutions expanding their reach with women customers across segments: consumer, high-net-worth, micro, and SME.
- Impact Champion — Honors FIs whose financing, savings, and insurance products are making a measurable difference in local economies for women-owned and women-led SMEs.
- Inclusion Champion (new for 2026) — Celebrates FIs driving financial inclusion by bringing very small and informal enterprises into the formal financial system at scale.
- Non-Financial Services Champion — Celebrates FIs going beyond the transaction to uplift women and women entrepreneurs through outstanding non-financial support.
- Digital Innovation Champion — Recognizes FIs deepening women’s access to savings, loans, and investment solutions through innovative digital tools and services.
- Women in Leadership Champion — Recognizes FIs that have made significant strides in women’s representation at the middle and senior management levels.
- Gender Data Champion — Spotlights FIs with exemplary practices in gender data collection and use.
- Engagement Champion — Spotlights FIs making outstanding contributions to Alliance peer learning programs.
Winners are selected based on FEAS data submitted and evaluated against strict quantitative metrics. To make it as fair as possible, we look not only at members’ performance in a given year, but also on year-over-year growth, and comparisons to national benchmarks from external sources.
What Winners Get
Recognition at the Champion of the Female Economy Awards isn’t just a trophy (though there is a trophy). Winners are celebrated at the Awards Ceremony, featured across Alliance communications, and given a PR toolkit to amplify the news at home. When you win a Champion of the Female Economy Award, you gain external visibility and validation as a leader in serving Women’s Markets. That carries weight: with your board, with investors, regulators, customers, and competitors.
Beyond the awards themselves, members that respond to the survey also receive annual individualized benchmarking reports with comparisons to regional and global peers, across several dimensions—segment, financial products, non-financial services and channels, as well as workforce DEI — for a robust picture of the business case for your Women’s Markets program.
The Dates to Know
The survey is live now. Please mark these dates:
- June 18: Final deadline for awards eligibility
- July 30: Final deadline to submit and receive benchmarking reports
- October 15: Awards ceremony
Your data tells a story. Make sure it gets told.
Meet last year’s Female Economy champions.
Explore aggregate results from the annual Female Economy Analytics Survey.
