Friday 13th February 2015
In 2002 the Superintendencia de Bancos e Instituciones Financieras de Chile (SBIF) began to compile and analyze sex-disaggregated data on the country’s financial system. Their report: “Gender in the Financial System,” aggregates quarterly sex-disaggregated data and integrates internal diversity statistics from a Gender Banking Survey, resulting in a compelling decade-long trend analysis of how well banks are doing with women in Chile.
This initiative arose from a government-led initiative that prioritized gender data as an important input for both policymakers and bankers. The SBIF was able to implement these requirements because there is a National ID number associated with each financial product sold in Chile. The SBIF cross checks the data by National ID number to identify individual owners, ensuring that no individual is counted more than once if they have multiple products from one or more banks. In this way, the data is an accurate assessment of financial inclusion in the country.
GBA interviewed the SBIF to understand how easy or difficult it is for banks to comply with this level of reporting. Nancy Silva, Claudia Alarcon and Carolina Flores from the SBIF’s Research unit shared that it was not difficult given their ability to sift through the data and extract the sex of the account holder themselves. As a result, none of the banks had to make any adjustments to their systems. The team is now looking to expand their use and analysis of the data by cutting it by income level, payment behavior and leverage, as well as projecting trends into the future.
There are a number of interesting insights that can be observed from the latest annual report, which illustrates some of the differences in the financial behaviors of women and men in Chile:
The work led by the SBIF presents one of the most comprehensive aggregate views of women’s behavior in a particular financial system. Tracking system-wide sex-disaggregated data not only provides access and usage data to banks, complementing their own market intelligence efforts, but is also an important input for policymakers. Expanding this type of supply-side data collection could also eventually lead to global aggregates that provide a fuller picture of the female economy and allow for country-wide comparisons to be made. GBA’s partnership with Data 2X is at the forefront of these efforts.