In 2021, the Alliance collectively served 67 million women customers, provided $137 billion of credit to women and held $120 billion in savings for them. These numbers are remarkable. But they do not show the full scope of our impact. In fact, they only reflect the data provided by the 60 percent of Alliance members that complete our annual Female Economy Analytics Survey (FEAS).
The members that complete the survey have access to distinct benefits. They’re eligible to win one of the Champions of the Female Economy Awards presented at the Annual Summit. And they receive customized benchmarking reports detailing how their institutions’ success with the women’s market stacks up to peers in their region and around the globe.
Equally as important, by providing data, members make a massive contribution to the Alliance’s mission to unlock women’s full economic potential. We publish the aggregated data each year in our Measuring the Value of the Female Economy report, which has become an industry benchmark that demonstrates the business case for targeting women and encourages other commercial players to enter the market.
The data also measure the progress members are making on key indicators, such as volumes saved by and lent to women across segments. And they highlight the levers driving success with women, such as non-financial services, internal gender diversity and inclusion efforts, and more recently, the uptake of digital financial services.
The combined impact of the large swath of Alliance members that contribute to the FEAS is incredible. This begs the question: What impact would we have and what deeper learnings could we glean if all members reported data?
Even greater impact and learning is our goal for the 2023 survey, which launched this past Thursday.
To support members in helping the Alliance reach this goal, we’ve updated the survey to be faster and easier to complete. We’ve added new time-saving functionality, like pre-populating qualitative questions with past answers and enabling automatic calculations to help respondents verify their inputs. We’ve also added definitions within the survey itself so that respondents can simply hover over a phrase (e.g., “Women-Owned Enterprise,”) or metric (e.g., “Non-Performing Loan Rate”) to see the related definitions and formulas.
In addition to these updates to the survey platform, we’ve also expanded our accompanying supports. As in past years, we’re sharing the survey in an Excel spreadsheet so the individuals submitting it on behalf of the organization can easily source information from the relevant teams. This year, we will also hold weekly “town halls,” where members can ask questions about completing the survey.
We also encourage members to join our new quarterly Task Force: Improving Gender Data Practices to work through common pain points, like identifying women SMEs. The Task Force held its first session today, and we welcome other members to sign up for the following sessions.
Finally, we remain at our members’ disposal to help however we can—including by modifying questions or processes in the future—as we do each year, to better meet your needs.
We thank our members for providing the information that has generated so many crucial insights used around the world to prove the business case for better serving women. We look forward to the day when data shows that equity has become the status quo.
