Looking ahead to 2016, we are pleased to be able to offer an increasingly robust set of peer learning opportunities and knowledge products that support banks in providing our hallmark holistic value proposition to women. Highlights include a new group of Mentee banks participating in our Mentoring Program; a series of Study Tours, with our first coming up next week at BLC Bank; a second edition of our guide to ‘Winning the Women’s Market,’ updated with new insights, data and examples; and the publication of proprietary pieces of research based on our members’ data, including a compilation of demand-side insights from 12 markets. We are particularly proud to announce that our 15th Annual Summit will be hosted by Chase Bank Kenya in Nairobi Oct. 18 to 20 — our first Summit on African soil and one we will ensure galvanizes many other banks operating on the continent to serve women well. In the past two years since their Women’s Market program’s inception, Chase Bank Kenya has proven that banks in Africa can and should bank on women.
In working toward our goal of 200 banks offering robust Women’s Market programs by 2018, the need to build capacity — both within banks and the institutions that support them — around the Women’s Market becomes more evident. This month we are proud to announce a new service offer to banks seriously considering the Women’s Market but not quite sure yet how and if they should do so. This GBA All-Stars Academy brings expert practitioners from leading GBA banks together to provide state-of-the art insights from distinctive geographic regions for three days of intensive training. We will host four workshops over the next 24 months, the first of which will be held in partnership with FMO this June in the Netherlands.
Our data analytics work continues this year with the expansion of the number of members reporting data and the publication of a series of insightful In Briefs on various aspects of the data challenge. Our first report of 2016 will be published next month — a Case Study on why and how the country of Chile has tracked sex-disaggregated data on the supply of banking services for over a decade. This Case Study is a must read for those interested in how better data can be made available to advance the development of the Women’s Market for financial services.
In 2015 we welcomed six banks as new members and hope to at least double that growth in 2016. As is custom, we interview one new member in each newsletter. This month we speak to Guillaume Perdon, Executive Managing Director of Banque Franco-Lao Ltd., who shares his vision for how his bank will become the bank of choice for women in the wonderful country of Laos.
As we look toward a full year of enriching activities, it is worth noting that none of this would be possible without the extraordinary generosity of our members and stakeholders, both in terms of finances and most especially in terms of their time.
Sincere thanks.
