Even where access gaps are narrowing, usage gaps persist. The reasons are often hiding in plain sight: financial products, customer journeys, and digital interfaces have historically been built around male-dominated usage patterns, overlooking women’s realities such as irregular income streams, time constraints, and trust barriers. The Alliance’s latest Ask the Expert session explored how two member institutions are designing customer and user experiences (CX and UX) that respond to those realities, bringing together Julie Dimitri, National Manager of Women in Enterprise at TD Bank Canada, and Marin Cundall, Managing Executive for Origination and Retail Payments at GoTyme Bank South Africa.
While the banks operate in vastly different contexts, their design insights pointed in the same direction:
From gender-neutral to gender-intelligent
“Gender intelligent” doesn’t mean building separate products; it means understanding where and why women drop off the customer journey and fixing it.
At GoTyme, that analysis started with South Africa’s most visible barriers: documentation requirements (formal ID, proof of address in a woman’s own name), the cost and time of reaching a branch, the intimidation of a formal banking environment, and lack of trust in institutions. The design response was structural: kiosks placed inside major grocery chains where lower-income women already shop, staffed by peer ambassadors from local communities, speaking local languages, guiding customers through the new-to-bank onboarding process on the spot. Biometric verification replaced paperwork, and the entire onboarding journey took under five minutes. Critically, ambassadors don’t stop at account opening: they help customers download the app, make a first deposit at the store’s cashier, and understand what the account can do — all in the same visit.
In Canada, TD’s Women’s Markets program is focused on women with businesses. Research commissioned by the bank to understand lower numbers of loan applications from female compared to male entrepreneurs surfaced a consistent pattern: women entrepreneurs self-select out before they ever reach a banker. Forty-three percent said they didn’t seek financing because they saw “no need”; 37 percent cited fear of debt repayment. TD’s fix is less about products than it is about building women’s financial literacy, and confidence, and building a trust-based advisory relationship — embodied in TD’s WE Banker network. These are accredited advisors trained to work with women entrepreneurs without bias, to guide and find solutions via a consultative process that guides through options rather than simply sell a product.
Simplicity, transparency, and the willingness to remove things
GoTyme’s most instructive design move has been subtraction: actively removing features that added complexity without adding value until what remained was genuinely accessible, easy-to-use and affordable. Savings product adoption rose sharply after the offering was streamlined. Importantly, all pricing was made completely transparent and easy-to-understand and surfaced at every transaction, because lack of pricing transparency was a documented reason women reverted to cash. Cundall called it a core principle: “transparency over pricing complexity.”
TD’s transparency work operates at the advisory level. Women entrepreneurs consistently take less credit than they qualify for and inadvertently damage their credit profiles in the process. A woman approved for $30,000 who draws $15,000 but uses $12,000 of it consistently scores as high-risk, while the same usage against the full amount does not. Advisors proactively surfacing this dynamic is a UX intervention that happens in a branch conversation, not on a screen.
Building for usage and loyalty, not just access
Both speakers emphasized an important principle behind their approach: acquisition metrics are a starting point, not the goal. Seventy percent of GoTyme’s female customers had not accessed formal financial services before — and 70 percent report quality of life improvements from having an account. The product features driving that sentiment are concrete: the highest savings rate available, doubled grocery rewards with their retail chain partner, and advances on unreliably timed social welfare grants that smooth cash flow for women managing irregular incomes. Usage deepens when the value proposition is specific and material.
For TD, loyalty is built through intentional visibility: featuring women entrepreneurs in a 12-part video series with Women of Influence+, buying their products at events, creating space for them on platforms where they’re already engaged. As Dimitri described it, a “two-way relationship” — not just you banking with us, but us taking part in helping to build your business.
The takeaway: Understand the key barriers women face in your market, disaggregate customer data by sex at each stage of the sales funnel, understand and address the barriers at each stage, simplify the UX wherever possible, and focus on long-term value delivery rather than short-term gains. The returns compound over time.
Alliance members interested in registering future Ask the Expert sessions should email peerlearning@financialallianceforwomen.org.
