Ten fintechs have been selected for the Alliance Hack 2023—and are embarking today on a 4-week journey that includes deep-dive clinics and mentoring sessions to guide them in designing effective gender-intelligent solutions. Offering their expertise are our members and partners, including folks from HSBC, Citi, BAC Credomatic and IFC and two former Alliance Hack winners, Tribe Fintech and LXME. We thank them and also our Hack sponsor, the Monetary Authority of Singapore. We’ll announce the winners live at the Annual Summit on Nov. 9. We wish all the participants the best of luck.
Our 2023 Learning Series: Gender Data Driving Business Decisions, got off to a flying start last week with 120 registered participants from 21 countries. Each of the four live webinars integrates use cases from our members, and last week, Banco Pichincha Ecuador and TymeBank South Africa impressed us with their numbers. We are now in the era of demonstrating empirically what we have known for 30 years about women being excellent savers, great borrowers, and if treated well, excellent advocates.
Banco Pichincha has knocked 16 percent off the gender gap in financing to MSMEs, with women now accounting for 44 percent of its MSME loan portfolio outstanding, and a significantly higher proportion of those women are more likely to be advocates for the bank, as measured by their Net Promoter Score (NPS), than their male counterparts.
At Tyme Bank in South Africa, women make up 57 percent of the customer base and are tellingly particularly receptive to their buy now pay later product—MoreTyme—where they make up 73 percent of customers. Also, as we have seen with other members, they are very receptive to insurance, accounting for 61 percent of Tyme’s health and funeral insurance product customers. And of course savings, making up 56 percent of Tyme’s GoalSave product. And like Pichincha’s experience, Tyme’s NPS score is significantly higher for women than for men. This does not happen by accident. Drilling down on the data enables smart product and service delivery design.
Next, the Learning Series is tackling the basics of how to disaggregate portfolio data by gender at the individual consumer and MSME levels, the first and not-so-easy step in any financial institution’s gender data journey.
As we look forward to launching the first WE Finance Code outside of the UK in the Dominican Republic at our Annual Summit in six weeks, we note that this first step of getting the data requires an investment—and the knowledge that it will enable the business to grow if used to tap into the full potential of the female economy.
Throughout the Summit, members and partners will share many data use cases. For example, they’ll address designing effective non-financial services solutions to enable women achieve business growth and designing climate-friendly financial products to enable women help mitigate and build their resilience to global heating, for which there is huge unmet demand. They’ll also cover designing gender-intelligent fintech and digital financial services and driving female-friendly entrepreneurial ecosystems through the adoption of national We Finance Codes.
We also look forward to the annual Champions of the Female Economy Awards ceremony based on members’ submissions to the Female Economy Analytics Survey. We thank our members for their diligent reporting, which helps us continue to build the business case for serving the female economy.
Making connections and sharing know-how is what our Annual Summit is all about. Most of our members and partners have already registered and booked their plane tickets, but if not, we encourage all of you to register now.
Finally, we’d like to give a big shout-out to the financial sponsors of this year’s Summit: Banco BHD, WE-FI, Mastercard, IDB Invest, Mapfre and BCIE. We’re extremely appreciative of your support.
In community,
