As part of the GBA’s recent partnership with Data2X and the Inter-American Development Bank to expand the collection and use of financial data on women in economies around the world, the Alliance has launched two Working Groups made up of experts from key stakeholder bodies. Over the next year, bankers, policy makers and representatives from development finance institutions will come together to understand the challenges and opportunities of sex-disaggregating customer data for banks.
Although the importance of data is recognized widely, banks face a number of challenges in establishing sex-disaggregated data as part of performance reporting. In the GBA’s recent study, “How Banks Can Profit from the Multi-Trillion Dollar Female Economy,” two out of the four main barriers that banks said prevented them from targeting the Women’s Market were directly related to the lack of bank data, including the perceived lack of a business case and the absence of sex-disaggregated data. GBA has found that the banks with the most successful Women’s Market programs are those that have invested in tackling these and other data-related challenges from day one.
With these challenges in mind, the GBA established the Women’s Market Data Working Group in January of 2015 and is launching the Women’s Market Data Task Force in March. The groups’ collective objective is to build commitment and consensus on concrete public and private sector actions for increasing the collection of sex-disaggregated data in the financial sector, and establish a platform to gather this data.
The Women’s Market Data Working Group is comprised of key bank practitioners and technical experts who come together to discuss challenges, share lessons learned, and promote the collection and use of sex-disaggregated data. Complementing these efforts, the Women’s Market Data Task Force, made up of key policymakers, international finance institution representatives, technical experts and other stakeholders, will work to highlight the most common global issues, bring concrete actions to solve them, and discuss best practice activities that can be implemented by different national and international actors.
Recommendations for what data can be collected and proposals for how best to support this will be presented and discussed by the two Working Groups at a Global Data Symposium, to take place Oct. 1, 2015, in São Paulo, Brazil. The Symposium will coincide with the 2015 GBA Annual Summit, which will be hosted by Itaú Unibanco from Sept. 29 to Oct. 1, 2015.
