Redeeming the pledge on gender equality
by Abhishek Gupta, Akhand Tiwari, Bhavana Srivastava and Sunita Rangaswami
Oct 29, 2018
1 min
Across the globe, a billion women remain financially excluded, with a gender gap of 9% persisting stubbornly in developing countries.
In existing products where women have been put at the centre of financial services, they have been conflated with ‘family’, leading to poor adoption. There is an urgent need to consider women as a distinct segment with specific financial services requirements. To enable this, financial services providers need to study the myriad social and behavioural impediments impacting women, and use this knowledge to design customised financial product offerings. An immediate push to bring gender-centricity as a lens and a mindset to the forefront of policy framework and product design can do wonders for financial services providers by adding a customer base of over a billion women, vastly undeserved, women.
A concise version of this paper was published as an op-ed in Mint.
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