Spotlight on: Inclusive Wealth Building
While India has done great work increasing access to bank accounts, over 40 percent of women-owned accounts remain dormant. And three out of four Indian women do not actively use India’s instant payments network. So, while women are getting to the entry point of finance, they are not making it to the destination: long-term asset ownership and wealth creation. Enter LXME, a wealth tech platform and Alliance member that set out to empower mass market women (think nurses, teachers) to make investments. LXME now has 1.2 million women customers, and the vision is to grow to 10 million with $30B – $40B assets under management; a flywheel that will enable LXME to reach 40-50 million women in the longer-term.
New research by LXME and EY, lays out women’s pathway to wealth-building in four steps: access (can a woman enter the system?), inclusion (is she using the finance?), agency (does she control the money?) and outcomes (is her life becoming more secure?). The research combines anonymized platform data from LXME with consumer research to capture how women move through their financial journeys from learning, to saving, investing, pausing, and returning over time. This quantitative analysis is combined with qualitative research that show not only what women do, but why.
Structural inequalities loom large. Lower labor force participation and disruptions for family care responsibilities results in the persistent gender pay gap. Lower and later exposure to investments, and more pressure to spend on family needs, means women end up with 60 percent of the retirement wealth of men. LXME disrupts this cycle. Starting with payments and rewarding usage with digital gold; tracking expenses; encouraging savings through challenges and articulated savings goals; and then starting to invest with low-ticket, entry-level investment products. Along the way, users engage in learning guided by the platform and the user community as their portfolio builds. LXME’s results are remarkable, as are their insights, all shared in this excellent report.
To find an investment product that appeals to women, look no further than stablecoin: cryptocurrencies backed up by strong fiat currencies like the USD or Euro. This was the subject of this month’s Ask the Expert session, where speakers shared use cases that particularly resonate with women. For example, Irina Chuchkina from Wallet in Telegram explained that women are saving in stablecoin as a hedge against inflation (given that their value is pegged to a stable global currency). Customer data from Wallet in Telegram show that women skew strongly toward savings products, yield accounts, and real-world assets like tokenized gold, not speculative trading. Click here to see more learnings from this insightful session.
Indeed, early results from Alliance member GoTyme’s recent launch of a tokenized gold product—PAX Gold (PAXG)—in the Philippines suggests similar behaviors from women. Usage shows buyers accumulating wealth rather than engaging in short-term trading, consistent with women’s goal-oriented investment patterns. Both LXME and Tyme Group excel at gender intelligent sales funnel design; when you combine that with great products like tokenized gold, it looks like we are at the dawn of more inclusive wealth building. Our next Ask the Expert session builds on this theme with a focus on customer service/user experience (CX/UX) that work for women.
We had the privilege this month of being able to train in-person WE Finance Kenya Code Signatories in Nairobi on how to support women micro and small enterprises in our 2.5 day Women’s Markets Playbook: Strategy Design for WMSMEs. A full house of participants from 46 institutions took part in the workshop, which covered theoretical frameworks, best practices and use cases from Alliance members in Kenya and globally. In June, we will be taking this training to Uganda to support Alliance member Private Sector Foundation Uganda’s (PSFU) efforts to upskill Ugandan Code signatories.
Speaking of Code signatories, registration is now open for this year’s WMSME Gender Data Learning Series, running over five weeks from May 14 – June 11. Offered in collaboration with We-Fi and the European Investment Bank, this intensive training sets FSPs on the path to sex disaggregate their data and design commercially viable strategies to support Women’s Markets and WMSMEs in particular. Open to all FSPs and Code Champions. Please register here.
It’s been terrific to see how our members marked International Women’s Day this month, as summarized in this month’s network news. Exemplifying with this year’s “Give to Gain” theme, we saw a range of initiatives, from KCB’s prestigious dinner where 300 businesswomen networked and were encouraged to sign up to mentor one another; to National Bank of Egypt’s provision of trade stalls for female entrepreneurs who are cancer survivors; to Stanbic Zambia’s radio show sharing investment options for women. Just some examples of the excellent work our members do year-round.
We thank all our members and strategic partners for investing in women and for the many ways they participate in the Alliance.
In community,
