As summer rolls on in the Northern Hemisphere, we at GBA have been hard at work with our colleagues at McKinsey & Company designing the GBA’s strategy for 2019–2021. The upshot is exciting and jibes well with the architecture of the 2018 GBA Summit, viewing disruption as a positive force and recognizing the need for all players to work together to create greater value for women.
Orchestrating ecosystem plays and bringing market-based solutions into a constructive dialogue with policy makers has always been part of the GBA’s DNA. The Summit provides the ideal opportunity to take our work to the next level and accelerate our members’ successes in building women’s wealth. Our best practice agenda this year starts with a look at women’s customer journey in 2030 and makes an in-depth exploration of the tradeoffs of digitalization and personalization. Truly leveraging technology while ensuring we are creating the right value for women will require FSPs to look beyond their usual ecosystems, partnering with at-scale players and building platforms to massify access to financial and non-financial services.
Jordan is an appropriate backdrop for this year’s Summit, given that Findex found the largest financial inclusion gender gap to be in MENA, and the IFC found an estimated US$38 billion finance gap among women-owned MSMEs in the region. Analyzing the underlying regulatory and legal barriers that have impeded more progress in the region – and what policies have been and should be put in place – will provide rich context for this year’s Policy Forum. We hope that by bringing together the public and private sector and the development community, we will help accelerate ecosystem plays that have massive and meaningful impact on women.
Meanwhile, our drive for more and better sex-disaggregated supply- and demand-side data (an essential underpinning of creating the market) continues through our WFID partnership, which is maturing into a great example of an ecosystem play. For this and more, please join us at the Summit – and if it is vacation time where you are, enjoy!
Thank you,
