post-symposium report

POST-SYMPOSIUM REPORT

In Review: The 2014 MasterCard Foundation Symposium on Financial Inclusion

Dear Friends:

It is our great pleasure to present this summary of our second annual MasterCard Foundation Symposium on Financial Inclusion. We find ourselves at a unique time, as new technology, new models and industries converge to expand the potential for financial inclusion to help fight poverty. That is why events like these, which attract such a diverse array of practitioners, influencers and thinkers can play a key role in building a bridge for a more client-centric approach to financial inclusion.

This year’s Symposium, once again, explored the theme of “Clients at the Center” by focusing on the “Client Journey.” The Foundation and the Boulder Institute of Microfinance wanted to increase awareness of how clients experience products and services, from the first time they hear about a product, to the point where they become regular users—and to look for clues about how we can improve what is being offered.

We structured the event to pool the deep experience acquired from all over the world and to stimulate new ways of thinking. We invited new players in the marketplace, as well as experts from allied sectors to help lay the groundwork of a more client-focused industry.

Over the next three years, we will continue to instigate important conversations and provide the fertile ground needed for participants to share ideas and examples of how they are introducing a more client-centric approach to financial services for the poor. We look forward to our next gathering and are eager to hear success stories from organizations taking the lead in this journey.


Ann Miles Director of Financial InclusionThe MasterCard Foundation

Robert Christen PresidentThe Boulder Institute of Microfinance

2

In the Symposium’s opening session, Reeta Roy of The MasterCard Foundation and Robert Christen of The Boulder Institute of Microfinance set out the rationale for client centricity. Both took a moment to recognize the gains made in reaching 200 million clients in their homes and communities. They highlighted the importance for service providers to think beyond their products and services, and cultivate a more client-focused mindset that embraces all aspects of the design and delivery of financial services to the poor.

The Symposium focused on five steps clients take on their journey to financial inclusion. We looked at how institutions engage with clients, how clients already manage their money, why do they buy new products and services, and what activities and product designs prompt them to use financial services effectively, share their experiences with others to build trust and then regularly use these products and services over the long-term.

Reeta Roy spoke of the need to build trust in order to expand the gains made in financial inclusion at the community and household level. Mainstreaming these gains, she said, can only arise from cultivating increased levels of confidence with institutions and clients. Only a concerted effort to reach excluded populations by understanding their needs can help build these relationships. This is client centricity. This is, she said, the industry “daring to trust clients.”

Bob Christen said that it is time to enter a new phase. We are more conscious about how the poor arrange their finances to achieve their most important family goals, and with new technology we can now handle transactions that are smaller than before. Much of the financial inclusion space is about a general population getting connected to the financial system, the challenge that brings us together is how we can reach poorer clients with better services in a viable way.

He highlighted three ways we can improve on client-centric financial services by (1) generating efficiencies in what we already do but in a more client-sensitive way, (2) being cognizant of the varying financial needs and goals that clients have during the different stages in their life-cycle, (3) including new market segments such as farmers, day laborers and low level salaried employees.

Mr. Christen said that it is easy to get on the bandwagon of client-centricity, but the question is not whether we currently have clients, the question is “are we maximizing the value of our financial services to clients while still making business sense for us?

Reflections on Clients at the Center and The Client Journey


“The theme of this year’s conference is game-changing. At its core, placing clients at the center of business strategy and operations, and providing them with products and services that respond to their needs, behaviours and aspirations... It will require a mindset shift, but the rewards will be great. Getting it right for clients will instill their trust and confidence in the formal financial system,

which simply does not exist today.” Reeta Roy

“We have spent 20 years putting the architecture in place with a very limited set of financial products that have been good enough to get to 200 million clients, providing a valued service… There is a feeling out there that it may be time to enter a new phase. We are ready to start to look at our business models and figure out a way that we might satisfy a much broader range of [client’s] goals and ability to manage cash flows.”

Bob Christen

3

As we look forward to next year’s Symposium, we took stock of the big themes emerging from this year’s keynotes, panels, debates and workshops. Some of the key takeaways include:

1. We need to know more about clients’ lives, their goals, and their needs to design better products and services. Poor households continue to improvise creative, but imperfect solutions to their financial needs, such as borrowing from family and friends. We also know that village-based savings groups often satisfy basic needs for savings and credit. While these solutions work at a subsistence level, their exclusion from the formal system makes them more susceptible to risk. Service providers need to develop client-centric products at the intersection of what is 1) desirable for people, 2) viable for business, and 3) feasible from a technological and regulatory point of view. This means understanding what clients care about (e.g. simplicity in messaging, trust, convenience, affordability), while also remembering that customers and the business environment are constantly changing.

Strive Masiyiwa of Econet Wireless explained that understanding client needs and building trust was essential to how his company’s mobile and financial inclusion products and services adapted to reach poor clients weathering the turmoil in post-conflict Burundi and of Zimbabwe’s inflation crisis.

Working to build that trust requires doing much more than simply rolling out a new service or product. Leslie Witt of IDEO, for example, advised that the sector look deeper into the behaviours of clients and design experiences that can provide a tangible sense of delight while exceeding their expectations.

Part of this work will involve grappling with an explosion of information. Symposium attendees heard about opportunities for using both new and static data sources, including data held by telecommunications firms, utilities companies, information from wholesalers, government data sets, publicly-available financial inclusion benchmarks, such as those provided by Finscope and The MIX Market, as well as the information financial institutions already have about their existing clients. Where possible, building in-house research capacity, although expensive, is crucial to continuously gaining client insights. Since the data mostly already exists, the challenge is how best to organize and use it, making it more easily accessible for data analytics. Sorting through these sources requires “a clear sense of the business problem you are trying to solve,” noted Daryl Collins of Bankable Frontier Associates.

The Symposium series hopes to inspire practitioners to explore the needs of population segments underserved and not well understood by the financial inclusion sector. We need to explore how to better assess the impact of providing financial services to groups such as smallholder farmers, young people and the chronically poor. It is important to dig deeper to uncover and synthesize research and testimonies from the people served.

2. Leadership is key to reorganizing an organization toward client-centricity. Attendees eagerly examined the practical implications of “daring to trust clients,” looking at everything from leadership to business processes and change management. Leon Lourens of PEP, Africa’s largest retailing brand, shared his company’s experience in making it a mission to serve low-income clients with goods and services. In the early 1990s PEP met a business downturn by reorganizing its business—from its negotiations with suppliers, to its front-end customer service—with the explicit purpose of making its clientele and its employees feel empowered, based on their core

Key Takeaways


“When people are seeing the value of the cash disappear overnight… trust in any form of institutions is hard to come by.” Strive Masiywa

4

values of dignity, respect, and growth. The company eliminated formal job titles and encouraged all staff to adopt simple rituals of respect based on their core values of dignity, respect, and growth. For example, every PEP employee can give anyone else, no matter how senior, a friendly high-five. The lesson learned was that employees—how they are trained, treated, and encouraged—play a critical role in achieving client-centricity.

Mark Flaming of MicroCred Group noted that client centricity means embracing new business approaches while acknowledging how it can be difficult for organizations to implement change where priorities are often in competition. Michael J. McCord of the MicroInsurance Centre and Lorenzo Chan of Pioneer Life shared a success story in adopting a customer-centric approach. They expanded their customer base among poor clients in the Philippines despite the higher cost of insurance following Typhoon Haiyan in 2013, and clients understood and appreciated the value of that service.

We know that the industry needs to hear more of these stories in order to build the necessary systems and workplace culture to deliver on the promise of client centricity. Over the course of this year, we will gather more examples from the field, to show how client-centric practices are both improving the lives of clients and the bottom lines of the institutions that serve them.

3. We need new business models that better serve those living in poverty. Mobile Network Operators, commercial banks, traditional microfinance organizations, and other new entrants are bringing different capabilities and strengths when it comes to serving the poor. Greta Bull of the International Finance Corporation noted that “this is an industry in need of disruption.” While Safaricom and M-Pesa have provided insight into the possibilities of mobile money, she said, they don’t offer a template that is replicable across all markets. To achieve the real dream of financial inclusion, new models and partnerships will need to be established. In this continually evolving ecosystem, there is a role for MFIs and other players. Mobile money is a platform on which people can deliver financial services.

We also need to know more about who is bringing what to the table, and what trade-offs are involved. Kamal Quadir of bKash, a Bangladesh-based mobile financial service provider, reflected on his company’s explosive growth among the poor. “Customers are ready to adopt new tools,” Mr. Quadir said. “But, is access to these types of services true financial inclusion?” Proper product design is key to reaching a certain market segment, but we need to be conscious of the unintended consequences products may have on people’s lives (e.g. example of bKash being “too good”). The sector is only in the early days of comprehending the impact of new technology on people’s lives.

Stephen Peachey of the World Savings and Retail Banking Institute (WSBI) noted that “our competition is not other banks. Our competition is informal, in cash ... we have to look at the way people handle cash, move it around. Seventy percent of the money in a Kenyan village moves within a kilometer ... you can’t move that on mobile money. “ He also focused on the mutual benefits of financial inclusion to institutions and to the poor and urged attendees to appreciate the economic potential of working with them. He noted that “the amount that many poor people save in various mechanisms could help many financial institutions double their balance sheet,” while allowing the poor to earn interest on their savings for the first time, and so creating real benefits to households.

This potential should serve as a catalyst for new and existing players to work together. The Symposium series will continue to generate new knowledge about the state of the industry, best practices and issues to consider as these new models come to market.

Key Takeaways


5

Financial Inclusion Is...


Click below to watch the video.

6

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceYSMoYYWSw

What does client centricity look like from the perspective of practitioners? What models of service is the sector gravitating towards? What are the available tools, techniques, technologies and learned wisdom that will guide product delivery in the future?

This year’s Symposium allowed attendees to explore the “nuts and bolts” of expanding financial inclusion. Workshops covered a host of topics, including the application of human-centered design, understanding different types of clients through segmentation, how to find and interpret client data and how to effectively deliver digital-based financial services.

For example, the workshop conducted by GSMA aimed to demystify data and look at how telecommunications companies can use data to understand and better serve clients. Participants discussed core questions around product usage and patterns, user segmentation, user experience and agent capacity to deliver services.

Dalberg, in their workshop on human-centered design, delved into what it takes to make it work in financial inclusion. They used the example of a recently launched mobile money product by a bank in Indonesia that had accumulated a lot of dormant users despite initial uptake. Through a step-by-step process, participants tried to understand the underlying causes of the dormancy, identify assumptions that may have led to the issue and come up with small/incremental ideas to address the problem.

In addition, the workshops explored new models for financial services and products as well as new kinds of customer markets, like finance for smallholder farmers or comprehensive insurance packages. To learn more about these workshops, please visit:

www.mastercardfdnsymposium.org/agenda

Recognizing Innovations in Financial Inclusion

Practitioners Workshop


7

Recognizing Innovations in Financial Inclusion

The MasterCard Foundation and The Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship announced two new competitions designed to encourage and recognize new ventures and new approaches for delivering customer centricity in financial inclusion. The MasterCard Foundation announced a new prize to reward demonstrations of client-centric practices in financial inclusion. The prize will be open to organizations of all sizes, operating anywhere in the world. In addition to cash, the prize will assign the winners with a dedicated learning partner to study and share how these practices work. In addition, The MasterCard Foundation & the Legatum Center announced the $200,000 Zambezi prize, to be awarded annually. The prize is designed to raise awareness of entrepreneurship and financial inclusion, encourage the flow of capital to financial inclusion ventures, and advance entrepreneurship and financial inclusion to fuel broad-based prosperity. For more information, visit: http//zambezi.mit.edu

CGAP’s “Clients at the Center” WorkSpace

At #SoFI2014, CGAP unveiled a new virtual community of practice for the financial inclusion sector called the “Customer at the Center WorkSpace.” More than a website, the WorkSpace is envisioned to be an open platform for collaboration between financial inclusion practitioners, policymakers, donors and providers. Learning from past work in building online tools for the sector, CGAP, in partnership with The MasterCard Foundation has built an easy-to-use and intuitive platform for users to get insights through collaboration on best practices, latest research and lessons learned from putting clients at the center. To see what’s already happening, visit: http://workspace.cgap.org


News

8

As financial relationships become more digitized, an existing debate within the financial inclusion sector takes on more urgency. Do financial service providers deliver the right set of services based on the right set of priorities in order to achieve financial inclusion? Are they too focused on minimizing organizational risk? How innovative or disruptive to financial inclusion priorities are the new mobile channels that deliver credit, savings and insurance to customers?

We wanted to know: What is gained and what is lost in this new paradigm? Kim Wilson of Tufts University moderated a debate on the following proposition: The future of financial services for the poor will rest primarily in highly automated, low-touch models for reaching clients.

Arguing for the low-touch approach was Eric Muriuki Njagi of Commercial Bank of Africa (CBA). In conjunction with Safaricom, CBA launched M-Shwari, a paperless banking service that provides M-PESA subscribers savings and short-term lending services that has achieved impressive numbers in a few short years. Seconding him was Katie Nienow from Juntos Finanzas, which won the G20 prize for financial inclusion in 2012. Juntos Finanzas builds personal finance tools for cash-based households that are accessible on any mobile phone via SMS.

Arguing for the high-touch approach was Andrew Youn of One Acre Fund. One Acre Fund serves 180,000 farmers in Burundi, Rwanda, Kenya and Tanzania through a value chain approach that provides farm inputs on credit, training and harvest sales support. Seconding him was Bindu Ananth of IFMR Trust which promotes Kshetriya Gramin Financial Services (KGFS). Each KGFS entity caters to a population of 5 million people through a branch-based model that delivers rural households with a customized portfolio that includes credit, insurance, savings and remittances.

A low-touch approach of automated, technology-driven products, Mr. Njagi and Ms. Nienow argued, has achieved tremendous scale over a short period of time. Mr. Njagi

challenged the audience to consider that customers may well be agnostic about who is delivering products and services, and to consider what solutions new and old financial products offer—at the low cost needed to reach the 2.5 billion people who are unbanked. He quoted Bill Gates who said, “banking is necessary—but banks are not.” Ms. Nienow highlighted that this is an argument about efficiency and how to create access to financial services, that technological improvements allows financial service providers to develop true and deep relationships with clients. Juntos Finanzas’ experience is that a highly scalable, low-cost, efficient model that provides value to clients is possible.

Arguing in favor of the high-touch approach, Mr. Youn and Ms. Ananth urged attendees to think beyond the impressive outreach targets of new technologies and consider what real impact these large scale outputs are having on people’s lives. They stressed that not all financial services are transactional; for example, credit and insurance often require a more high-touch approach to ensure impact. They emphasized that financial access alone is not the end goal – actual outcomes are more important than the number of clients reached. The team also pointed out that high touch means taking responsibility for what is happening with the customer. There is a need to address their financial problems more directly and bridge the gap between intention and action. The high-touch arguments ultimately shifted the audience’s perception and Mr. Youn and Ms. Ananth were voted the debate winners.

Debate: The Best Way To Interact With Clients-High-touch or Low-touch


Main take-away: High touch doesn’t necessarily mean high cost, low touch doesn’t mean low engagement. The ultimate goal should be to use technology to scale customer-centric financial services, and to reach scale with the appropriate impact!

9

… At its core, placing clients at the centre of business strategy and operations, and

providing them with products and services that respond to their needs, behaviours, and

aspirations... will require a mindset shift, but the rewards will be great.

-Reeta Roy


1 0

We look forward to next year’s Symposium, where we will further examine and debate how we can best serve the Client Journey and provide “how-to” examples of profitable models. We will include more voices from the field of practice, both from practitioners and the people we serve. In the meantime, we will be gathering insights and research to strengthen knowledge about client centricity in financial inclusion in order to develop a thought-provoking agenda for 2015.

As we go, we encourage you to visit the workspace we launched with our partners at CGAP: http://workspace.cgap.org

We also invite you to share any suggestions or feedback by contacting us at [email protected]

Stay Connected

We also invite you to keep an eye out at http://mastercardfdnsymposium.org for updates as next year’s agendas and

conversations emerge.

Looking for Video Highlights?

You can find video highlights from the Symposium here: Video Highlights

Storify

Click here to find our Storify compilations: https://storify.com/MCFoundation

Looking Forward


1 1

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWfYQC_kKvCAb3lH6ASNPz35IiB9xNENK

http://mastercardfdnsymposium.org/

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWfYQC_kKvCAb3lH6ASNPz35IiB9xNENK

https://storify.com/MCFoundation

Best of SoFI 2014Click here to watch the video.


1 2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzPQFMNOrSw

Speakers


Jeff Abrams – Senior Associate, Bankable Frontier AssociatesJeff Abrams is a Senior Associate at Bankable Frontier Associates (BFA). Since joining BFA, Jeff has focused on business

models and product design to facilitate the financing of affordable housing and related basic infrastructure in developing

countries; and, on strategic planning and analysis of market-based initiatives to extend the “bankable frontier” for effective

savings accounts.

Bindu Ananth – President, IFMR TrustBindu Ananth is the Chairperson and President of IFMR Trust and is a Director of all investee companies of IFMR Trust.

Prior to this, Bindu worked in ICICI Bank’s microfinance team between 2001 and 2005 and was head of the new product

development team within their Rural Banking Group in 2007. Bindu has published in the Economic and Political Weekly, the

OECD Trade Policy Paper series and the Small Enterprise Development Journal.

Matthew Bishop – US Business Editor, The EconomistMatthew Bishop is the US Business Editor and New York Bureau Chief of The Economist. He is a member of the World

Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on the Role of Business, and is writing the report of the Taskforce on Social Impact

Investment established by the governments of the G8, to be published this September. He was a member of the Advisors

Group to the UN International Year of Microcredit 2005.

Tillman Bruett – Programme Manager, UNCDFTill Bruett is the Programme Manager of Mobile Money for the Poor at UNCDF, an initiative to make mobile and branchless

financial services available to low income and rural households. He has over 20 years of experience in commercial banking,

microfinance, and financial inclusion.

1 3

Greta Bull – Programme Manager, The Partnership for Financial InclusionGreta Bull is the program manager for The Partnership for Financial Inclusion and the IFC manager of the micro-retail

business line in Sub-Saharan Africa, leading IFC’s advisory services in microfinance, mobile financial services and insurance

on the continent. She has 23 years of experience in international development, of which almost half have been spent in

development finance.

Lorenzo Chan – President and CEO, Pioneer Life in the PhilippinesLorenzo Chan is the President and CEO of Pioneer Life in the Philippines. Under his leadership, Pioneer Life exceeded the two

Billion peso milestone in premium production and is one of a handful of players in the market offering unit-linked products

and special coverage for overseas Filipino workers (OFWs).

Robert Christen – President, Boulder Institute of MicrofinanceRobert Christen is President and founding member of the Boulder Institute of Microfinance. He currently holds the position

of Professor of Practice in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University in New York. He has

held several positions including Director of Financial Services for the Poor at The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Senior

Advisor for CGAP at the World Bank.

Gerhard Coetzee – Senior Specialist, CGAPGerhard Coetzee is a Senior Financial Sector Specialist at CGAP. He leads the Customers at the Centre initiative that strives to

embed customer centricity in financial service providers to ensure more customer-focused, relevant and responsible delivery

of financial products and services that will advance financial inclusion.


Speakers

1 4

Daryl Collins – Director, Bankable Frontier Associates Daryl Collins leads the research efforts of Bankable Frontier Associates (BFA), with a specialization in the demand-side

dynamics of development finance. She was the principal investigator of the “Financial Diaries, 2003-2004” field study based

at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and is a co-author of the bestselling book, Portfolios of the Poor. Daryl began

her career as an emerging market economist at a New York investment bank.

Tilman Ehrbeck – CEO, Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP)Tilman Ehrbeck is the CEO of the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP), a policy and research center dedicated

to advancing access to finance for the world’s poor. Over the past 10 years, he has advised a number of governments,

microfinance networks, foundations and commercial players on a broad range of financial inclusion issues ranging from new

services and products aimed at better meeting underlying end-user needs; to new business models significantly lowering

operating costs; and, to enabling infrastructure and policy interventions.

Mark Flaming – COO, Microcred GroupMark Flaming is the COO of the Microcred Group. His career spans almost 30 years in developing financial institutions,

regulatory frameworks, supervision regimes and funding market instruments in the mass market financial industry. In the

past seven years, he has worked for a wide range of clients in the private commercial and public regulatory sectors related to

mobile financial services.

Lara Gilman – Senior Commercial Manager, GSMAGerhard Coetzee is a Senior Financial Sector Specialist at CGAP. He leads the Customers at the Centre initiative that strives to

embed customer centricity in financial service providers to ensure more customer-focused, relevant and responsible delivery

of financial products and services that will advance financial inclusion.


Speakers

1 5

POST SYMPOSIUM REPORT

Natalia Gomez – Associate, Bankable Frontier Associates Natalia Gomez is an Associate at Bankable Frontier Associates, specializing in developing the business case for providers of

financial services to low income clients. Her last role at Bancolombia was to create and direct the Financial Inclusion team.

Leon Lourens – Managing Director, PEPLLeon Lourens is the managing director of PEP, Africa’s largest single brand retailer that sells clothing, footwear, homewares,

cellular products and financial services. Leon has more than 25 years’ experience in retail and most of his experience stems

from store operations. He believes that the customer should be at the centre of everything PEP does and actively drives his

teams to know and understand their customers better.

Katie Martin – Managing Director, ideas42Katie Martin is Managing Director at ideas42. Before that, Katie spent eight years working as a communications specialist in

different parts of the UK Government, including positions at the Youth Justice Board and the Home Office. She was the Chief

Press Officer in the Prime Minister’s Office, working closely with Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his team on policy issues

as diverse as social security, economic mobility, education, government efficiency, crime, and military and foreign affairs.

Strive Masiyiwa – Chairman and Founder, Econet WirelessStrive Masiyiwa is the chairman and founder of Econet Wireless. He also serves on a number of boards, including the

Rockefeller Foundation, the Council on Foreign Relations’ Global Board of Advisers, the Africa Progress Panel and the UN

Secretary General’s Advisory Board for Sustainable Energy. He currently co-chairs the AU/WEF platform for investment in

African agriculture and is the Chair of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). In 2012, Strive was invited by

President Obama to address leaders at the G8 Summit on how to increase food production and end hunger in Africa.

Speakers

1 6

POST SYMPOSIUM REPORT

Michael J. McCord – President, MicroInsurance CenterMichael McCord is President of the MicroInsurance Centre, a specialized consulting firm focused on research, advocacy

and designing microinsurance products and processes that meet the needs of low-income clients. He also led a multi-

year research effort, the Microinsurance Learning and Knowledge (MILK) project, designed to answer client value and the

business case of microinsurance. Michael has written extensively on microinsurance, including the new “Microinsurance

Product Development for Microfinance Providers.”

Ann Miles – Director, Financial Inclusion, The MasterCard FoundationAnn Miles is the Director of Financial Inclusion at The MasterCard Foundation. Before joining the Foundation, Ann was a

Managing Director at BlueOrchard Finance, S.A., a for-profit asset management company based in Geneva, Switzerland

which specializes in microfinance commercial debt and equity investments. She also worked for Women’s World Banking

(WWB), where she managed the Capital Markets team which helped WWB’s network members’ access funding in the

local and international financial markets, and before that was also a Vice President at Citibank, where she worked in trade

finance, corporate and private banking.

Marco De Natale – CFO, FINCA AzerbaijanMarco De Natale is the Chief Financial Officer at FINCA Azerbaijan, where he is responsible for all financial operations. Prior

to joining FINCA, he worked for 10 years in various investment banks in London (Merrill Lynch, Credit Suisse First Boston, and

Barclays Capital) and as a Regional Manager for BlueOrchard Finance in Geneva.

Katie Nienow – Co-Founder, Juntos FinanzasKatie Nienow is the Co-founder of Juntos Finanzas, an organization that works with partners worldwide to design and

implement empowering personal finance tools for cash-based households. Prior to working at Juntos, Katie worked in the

field of microfinance, first in field operations, based in Lubumbashi and Kinshasa in DR Congo, and then based in the US in

development.

Speakers

1 7


Eric Muriuki Njagi – Business Manager, Commercial Bank of Africa LimitedEric Muriuki Njagi is a Business Manager at CBA Commercial Bank of Africa Limited. Eric has had a distinguished career in

financial services, spanning 15 years, with both local and multinational banks in Kenya, where he has held various dynamic

roles in IT, Change Management, Strategy and Business Development. He has been a prolific change agent in the Kenyan

financial services market, innovating and commercializing new products and channels.

Stephen Peachey – Programme Technical Adviser, World Savings Banks Institute FacilityStephen Peachey is a financial sector information specialist and has over 30 years’ experience of financial and private sector

development at both policy and individual institutional levels. He is currently Programme Technical Adviser to a World Savings

Banks Institute Facility to help selected savings banks double the number of savings accounts in the hands of the poor.

Iqbal Quadir – Founder and Director, Legatum Center at MIT Iqbal Quadir has been a pioneer in creating inclusive ventures in low-income countries. In the 1990s, he founded

Grameenphone in Bangladesh; it now has 50 million customers. With this inclusive philosophy in mind, Quadir founded

Legatum Center at MIT to help MIT students create innovative ventures which view the average person in a low-income

country as the customer.

Kamal Quadir – CEO, bKashKamal Quadir applies technology to allow people to advance economically, which, in its wake, bring about social progress.

Currently, Kamal is the CEO of bKash, a leading mobile money service owned by BRAC Bank, Money in Motion, IFC and

Gates Foundation, which offers millions of unbanked people access to financial services through basic cell phones in

Bangladesh.

Speakers

1 8


Dolores Torres – President, CARD Bank Inc.Dolores M. Torres is the President and Chief Executive Officer of CARD Bank, Inc., and a member of CARD-MRI in the

Philippines. In her 23 years with CARD MRI, Dolores has held various positions and garnered vast experience in the areas

of microfinance. Under her leadership, CARD Bank has been consistently awarded the Financial Inclusion Champion of the

Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas.

Reeta Roy – President and CEO, The MasterCard FoundationReeta Roy is President and CEO of The MasterCard Foundation. A passionate advocate, Reeta works to ensure that the

Foundation is focused on the people it serves, and she travels extensively in the communities where it is active. Reeta is a

member of the Aspen Philanthropy Group and the World Economic Forum on Social Innovation. She has spoken before a

wide array of forums including the UN General Assembly, Clinton Global Initiative and the UNESCO Youth Forum.

Olivia White – Associate Partner, McKinsey & CompanyOlivia White is an Associate Partner in the San Francisco office of McKinsey & Company and a core member of the Firm’s Risk

Management and Service Operations. She has extensive experience serving a broad range of financial institutions and social

sector clients. Her areas of focus in risk management include operational risk, enterprise risk management, risk appetite,

stress testing, and organizational design.

Kim Wilson – Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts UniversityKim Wilson is on the faculty of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-author of the book

Financial Promise for the Poor: How Groups Build Microsavings. She is a visiting fellow of the Feinstein International Center

as well as a Senior Fellow and a member of the Council of Emerging Market Enterprises. She oversees Fletcher’s Leadership

Program in Financial Inclusion – a nine-month Fellowship for financial policymakers and regulators in emerging markets.

Speakers

1 9


Leslie Witt – IDEOLeslie Witt leads IDEO Bay Area’s Financial Services domain, a group deeply committed to re-imagining the products,

services, systems and institutions that shape people’s financial lives and behaviors. Much of her recent work has focused on

innovation within the financial sector, but she also brings to the table deep experience in brand, hospitality, organization and

service design.

Andrew Youn – Founder, One Acre FundAndrew Youn started One Acre Fund in 2006. Andrew graduated from Yale magna cum laude, is a former management

consultant, and received his MBA from Kellogg School of Management. Andrew co-founded the program in Kenya with

John Gachunga, and lives in western Kenya.

Speakers

2 0

The moment of truth is not the sale of the service; it’s what the service is

providing people.-Bindu Ananth


2 1

post-symposium report

Documents