In This Issue
Spotlight On: The Year Ahead

The traditional white Alpine vista that serves as the backdrop to the annual convening of business and political leaders at Davos last week was replaced by brown, reminding us of the urgency to act on the climate crisis, a central theme of the proceedings. The intersection between women and climate action is rarely discussed, and when it is, it often boxes us into low-income rural women who need to replace open fires with eco-stoves. However, research shows that women are more inclined to make more climate-conscious household purchases, are more likely than men to start and scale green companies and are twice as likely to invest in green or climate-focused products.

Within the Alliance membership, we are seeing serious efforts to bridge the “E” and the “S” of ESG, and we think an important nexus is developing value propositions that support women customers to be green. This is the focus of our newest working group, “Hardwiring Climate Action: Greening the CVP for Women,” kicking off in February. Over eight sessions, we’ll share the latest innovations productizing for greening women’s markets and work toward developing a playbook that our members—and beyond—can use.

Working on this nexus is a natural next step toward supporting gender-diverse and inclusive workforces and customer bases, which is essential to the long-term health of our members and economies. We’re underpinning these efforts by ramping up our work on gender data in 2023. This includes:

– Supporting the development of country-level dashboards to track progress on women’s access and use of financial services;

-Providing peer learning on data, including a second Data Learning Series on how to use gender data to drive business decisions;

-Offering a Data Working Group focused on the pain points and solutions for becoming a gender-data-driven organization;

-And upgrading our data analytics services to make it easier for members to report performance data and receive real-time benchmarking.

Use cases are a key part of the data work, and this month, we’re proud to publish the findings of a deep-dive analysis of Banco Pinchincha’s portfolio by fellow Alliance member, Mastercard. The analysis uncovered how the bank could increase its annual profits by $10M. While many of the details remain proprietary to Banco Pichincha, we hope this report stimulates demand from other members to look into this type of analysis.

For those seeking to design or scale their women-centered strategies, we’re offering our foundational training program, All-Stars Academy. For staff who are new to these efforts, we’re also launching our Primer On The Female Economy, a high-level introduction to developing a women-centered strategy that will be available on our smart-learning platform.

Also in response to member demand, we’re launching a Women’s Markets Workforce Training. This program teaches FSP staff about the strategic import of a Women’s Markets program and teaches the frontline in particular, how to treat women customers with empathy and offer them a range of solutions that meet their needs. You can find the full menu of learning and networking opportunities for the year here.

None of this would be possible without our extraordinary, growing member base. We ended 2022 with 90 members, and in 2023 we will cross 100, buoyed by a growing cohort of fintech organizations focused on the female economy.

As we look toward a full year of enriching activities, this month we welcome a new kind of member to the Alliance. CONAFIPS is an apex institution supporting retail financial services providers in Ecuador with a comprehensive set of products that enable them to serve the unbanked and underbanked. We interview Roberto Romero, CEO, who shares the institution’s approach to supporting the female economy and why other countries should consider it a great model to adopt.

We acknowledge that none of our work would be possible without the extraordinary generosity of both our members and our strategic partners. Together, we look forward to a wonderful 2023.