INEZ LETTER OCTOBER 2020

We are delighted with the turnout at our 2020 Summit earlier this month with over 1200 people registered from 103 countries and on average 500 unique visitors each day. Participants in turn were delighted with the quality of the content, giving us a 99 percent satisfaction rate. In this issue of our newsletter we’ve collated key takeaways from each day and in case you missed any of the panels, we also encourage you to view the recordings of each of the sessions on our YouTube channel.

Our worry that the pandemic has lessened CEO’s commitment to the women’s market is unfounded, as leaders from the Alliance shared their renewed sense that a robust strategy has built their company’s resilience during our CEO Roundtable, a closed-door session that took place an hour before the public Summit.

The theme of leaders championing the female economy kicked off our first day with Ann Cairns, Alliance Chair and Executive Vice Chair of Mastercard, laying out an exciting challenge to leaders to set aspirational goals for transforming the financial services sector to be fully inclusive of women—at all levels of their organizations and in their business strategies—and, for each to share their business case to other leaders, so that word-of-mouth can be truly leveraged C-Suite to C-Suite. Examples of just that followed in the Opening Panel with leaders of the Alliance sharing their business cases followed by discussions from a wider set of ecosystem actors on the business case for non-financial services and emerging innovations to scaling the offer. The quote of the day belonged to wealthtech innovator, Sallie Krawcheck, who noted that beyond the income gap we must focus on the wealth gap:“In the US women earn 82 cents for every dollar a man earns, but when it comes to how much wealth she ends up with, it is 30 cents for every dollar a man has —and it’s one cent if she has black or brown skin.”

Sopnendu Mohanty, Chief Fintech Officer of the Monetary Authority of Singapore and partner on our Alliance Hack, started Day 2 with a strong and encouraging regulator response to our latest research into How Fintechs Can Profit From the Multi-Trillion Dollar Female Economy—itself breaking a record in terms of number of downloads from our website. Sopnendu outlined his recipe for getting the fintech sector to become more gender intelligent—‘We need to build public infrastructure/utilities to drive opportunity for all of us, for diversity. A lot of policy work to be done, a lot of data to be collected, a lot of dialogue to build a supportive ecosystem.’ The research prompted us to host our first Hackathon and we encourage you to take a look at our winners who were chosen based on ten criteria including their innovation, scalability, and impact on the female economy.

A clear message came through for us during our journey into fintech and the female economy. Women’s market teams inside our members need to connect with the team (s) responsible for fintechs within their own institutions in order to be able to fully solve for pain points women customers face. And fintechs need to connect with banks and others with large distribution channels to be able to scale and reach the market. We will support this as part of our journey to mobilize the fintech sector to be gender intelligent. Watch this space for next steps.

Our Resource of the Month is our How-to Guide: Becoming the Employer of Choice for Women, written by members for members. The Guide, developed with the thought leadership of Mercer and the financial support of CDC, headlined the final day of the Summit which looked at the future of work for women given the recent acceleration in flex work for example, and likely impact on getting greater female representation in the leadership of the financial services sector.

The capstone of our Summit was announcing and celebrating the winners of our annual Championing the Female Economy Awards. The awards recognize outstanding Alliance member institutions globally for their vision, commitment, and contributions to women and to the Alliance.

We also acknowledge our awesome Summit sponsors— Mastercard, FMO and CDC; our wonderful and committed members; our strategic and ecosystem partners and our many new friends galvanized through attending the Summit to champion the female economy.

Last but not least, thank you to our growing number of readers, all 6,000 of you!

In community,