As part of the Center for Financial Inclusion’s Financial Inclusion Week 2022, Good Business Lab organised a virtual panel to tackle the exclusion of women from financial technologies, and the path forward.

Digital platforms have revolutionised economic access in the Global South. Yet, only 2.5% of women with access to formal bank accounts are using them to carry out transactions. This exclusion is not incidental but structural.

Can vulnerable populations like migrant working women be brought into the fold of digital finance? What role does design and technology play in this process? Panelists spoke on these and many other questions regarding access to financial technologies. They also presented possible solutions that can be effective and scalable. discussed bottlenecks in delivering fin-tech (financial technology) products to women and scaling financial mobilization in gender-fragmented contexts.

Key Insights from the Session

1. Providing training on digital remittance to migrant women cannot be accomplished without sustained interactions with them and handholding while using the digital platform. We need to  understand the underlying mechanisms that are preventing women from using digital platforms, then research can be generalized and scaled-up.
2. The biggest challenge in scaling a product is cultivating trust and that should be kept in mind while design a product or a service.  41% of the Pakistani population engages in community-based savings groups called ROSKA’s, where a group of people come together to start saving or take credit from each other. This research is what led the team at Oraan to set up  Oraan committees in Pakistan for digital financial services.
   
3. In India, we have a lot of mobile and internet users, but we still don’t have a lot of informed internet usage for carrying out personal or professional tasks. An informed understanding of what the benefits of technology are, how it can help one scale up their business, plan your expenses, transact online, and receive the benefits of various schemes online. These aspects need to be translated to women.

Halima Iqbal is the CEO and founder at Oraan. A former investment banker and consultant with 8 years of experience, Halima moved back to Pakistan in 2017 after a decade in North America with a drive to make finance inclusive and simple for the underserved millions.

Kazim Rizvi is the Founding Director of The Dialogue, a public policy think-tank based out of New Delhi. An important voice in India’s tech policy ecosystem, Kazim works on the intersection of technology, policy and society, with a focus on evidence-based research and discourse.

Smit Gade currently serves as Associate Director at Good Business Lab (GBL) where he oversees field-based and data-based research projects. He holds an M.Phil. in economics from the University of Oxford with a focus on applied econometrics and development economics.

Satyavrat currently serves as a Communications Manager at GBL. He has a rich background in journalism and technology policy writing for renowned platforms like The Hindu, Scroll, Himal Southasian, Bot Populi, and Elle Magazine.