The ROI of Inclusion: How Representation Drives Results

Amanda Estiverne-Colas: To me, representation is who's in the room. It's all about visibility and presence, right? But inclusion is the powerful source to that. It's the powerful igniter to that.

It's who holds the power and where does the value flow, which is really important. And inclusion, of course, is access. Vera Futorjanski: I'm shocked every time I say this sentence. Every third person in the world is unbanked.

It just blows my mind. How can we, while we are building in hyperloops and flying taxis and going to Mars, still have every third person unbanked? What is financial inclusion? It's a key enabler to reduce extreme poverty and boost shared prosperity, right?

I mean, that's what we want. What we want is to get more people to have access to money. Reem Ikram: The whole economy has become so supportive of women entering the workforce, specifically because it has been a huge change over the last four years or five years that there's just so much attention. And to be honest, I do believe Saudi, especially at this point in time, to be leading or to be having a big voice in making this transition globally.

Jacqueline O'Flanagan: If I look back at my career, there were very few women in those leadership roles. And so I have over time had to fight to have a broader seat at the table, but I also try and champion those whose voices are not as strong. And I think I realized later in my career the power that a role like mine had, or even the ability to speak up and be heard. And so I now champion that for the better.

Nora Hocke: What do we gain when we invest in others? Annika Melchert: In access. Nora Hocke: In education. Annika Melchert: In representation.

Nora Hocke: In community. Annika Melchert: This year's International Women's Day theme is Give to Gain. The idea that when we pour into others, the returns don't just come back. They compound.

Nora Hocke: But in fintech, an industry built on growth and return. What does that really look like? Annika Melchert: On this special International Women's Day episode from Fintech Files from BCG Platinion, we explore that question. Nora Hocke: We hear from four formidable women shaping the future of financial services.

Amanda Estiverne-Colas, board member at NAFLI, the National Alliance for Financial Literacy and Inclusion. Jacqueline O'Flanagan, Canadian financial services industry lead at Microsoft. Reem Ikram, CEO and co-founder of ThriftPlan. And Vera Futorjanski, founder of Beyond Global and Veritas Ventures.

Amanda Estiverne-Colas: Financial inclusion is all around access. And this is why I love the fintech community because it's building creative solutions for the folks who are typically left out. And so it's not necessarily just a nice to have. I'm sure we'll tap into this, but it's overall to the bottom line.

It impacts the bottom line. Nora Hocke: Amanda sits on the board of NAFLI, an organization working to bridge the gap between financial innovation and financial literacy. To her, giving means making sure the door you open is one people can actually walk through safely. Amanda Estiverne-Colas: We're letting folks in, but let's make sure we're letting them in safely.

Just being able to bridge the gap with financial literacy and education is really important because just like we said, financial inclusion is access. One of the things that I really appreciate is there are a lot of fintech organizations that are tapping into the area of financial education, but creating financial education that speaks to its consumers. So for example, I love what Monzo's doing. Annika Melchert: Yes.

Amanda Estiverne-Colas: They have tapped into leveraging social media platforms to speak to their consumers. They're going to the consumers where they're at. They're providing financial education in a format that is digestible to their consumers so they understand. That they learn.

And so not only does that tend to the consumers they have already acquired, but it also tends to the consumers that they acquire as well. Annika Melchert: Reem Ikram built ThriftPlan after confronting a personal version of this gap. Arriving in Saudi Arabia, tax-free paycheck in the hand, and suddenly realizing nobody was building for her future. Reem Ikram: So there's no 30% or so deduction for taxes and social security and all of that bit, which was fun the first and second month.

But then I started thinking and said, "So wait a second. I'm not paying anything in Germany and I'm not paying anything in Saudi Arabia. So who's going to give me this free pension that I never paid into?" And that's when I started wondering and getting a bit more agitated.

And really started talking to my friends and family about this issue that I don't really know where my pension will be. And I don't really know if I'm saving enough to support myself once I retire. Nora Hocke: The answer she built? A flexible savings program that gives employees a structure for their future while giving employers a retention tool, a double gift, and a double gain.

Reem Ikram: Think about it like this. It's like a flexible savings plan that companies offer for their employees. So you have two sides of it. As an employee, it's a very lucrative savings program because if you put 1,000 riyals, for instance, your company might also put 1,000 riyals.

So you're basically doubling your savings. You do that over a couple of years. Those are invested, and you will then generate your five, six, whatever percentage of return year-on-year. And it just helps you get prepared or get financially stable for the future.

On the other hand, it helps companies because think about the workforce or how you attract talent. In Saudi until about three, four years ago, or actually much earlier, maybe more like one year ago, we run after salary, but employees didn't look for things like what benefits do you get? What insurance do you get? Do you get coverage for education or any of those things?

And that's really what's causing a lot of trouble in the hiring market for companies that employees have a very, very huge turnover. So while we do support employees, of course, with being able to double their savings, we also support companies by creating a long-term incentive program for their employees to stay with them for longer. And therefore, save additional funds from hiring, training, et cetera, new employees permanently or reoccurringly. Annika Melchert: Vera Futorjanski has spent her career giving in a different but related way.

Creating environments where people who are usually excluded from the conversation can finally be part of it. Vera Futorjanski: It's a curated community of female leaders that I have launched last year, in fact, on International Women's Day. I've done lots of research prior to that to understand what is it that women really want? What are we seeking?

And a lot of that is belonging. Women really want community. They want to be part of a safe and trusted space where they know that other women actually really have their back. Jacqueline O'Flanagan: If I look back at my career, there were very few women in those leadership roles.

And so I have over time had to fight to have a broader seat at the table, but I also try and champion those whose voices are not as strong. And I think I realized later in my career the power that a role like mine had, or even the ability to speak up and be heard. And so I now champion that for the better. Wherever I have the opportunity to create cross-collaboration programs across the entire ecosystem, so whether that be with clients or with regulators or whatever the case is.

But also to reinvest and support other programs like STEM or different programs for girls who game and things like that, that create technology impact and awareness at a young age. And a young foundation, I think is critical. Nora Hocke: Give to Gain only works if the gains are real and quantifiable. Annika Melchert: A recent study from the Center for Financial Inclusion found that when small firms in emerging markets adopt the digital financial tools, they were up to 10% more likely to report revenue growth.

And BCG research shows that companies with at least 30% female leaders are 15% more profitable than those without. Nora Hocke: And Jacqueline, Reem, Vera, and Amanda present striking evidence of that. Amanda Estiverne-Colas: When you go back into representation versus inclusion, to me, representation is who's in the room, right? It's all about visibility and presence.

To me, that's representation, but inclusion is the powerful source to that, right? It's the powerful igniter to that. It's who holds the power and where does the value flow? Our product teams cannot have the same background, same faces, right?

We need to make sure we have diverse perspectives, diverse voices in the room, and you forget that your customer is in the room. We all bank. Annika Melchert: Definitely. Amanda Estiverne-Colas: Right, exactly.

And so that's why it's important for us to have different voices in the room. We think of biases and ethical considerations with the technology that we're building and what alleviates that and what protects us to not go in the wrong direction is to make sure that not only do we have the right representation in the room, but that we're listening to these voices as well. Annika Melchert: Jacqueline frames this not just as a fairness issue, but as a strategic one. The more diverse the input, the more robust the output.

Nora Hocke: So what does that mean for financial organizations? How does increasing the number of women in senior leadership roles change outcomes and ultimately performance? Jacqueline O'Flanagan: When I think about it through that lens, definitely broader diversification of leadership, definitely different ways of thinking. The ability to multitask and bring different perspectives from every day, and really create that broader way of thinking across not just who are actuallyand female diversity, but across an entire culturally diverse leadership ecosystem.

I think the more we show up as individuals and bring different perspectives and different inputs and different cultural attributes to that, the better we can shape the world for a future environment that hopefully, we will see more and more diversity across all spectrums. Nora Hocke: From Reem's perspective, the momentum is tangible in the energy, ambition, and leadership she sees in her own company. Reem Ikram: If you look at my own company, I think I have a good 54% of my employees that actually are ladies.

You have a very energetic and very excited portion of the industry that are ladies, and it's not uncommon now to have senior positions held by ladies. Annika Melchert: Vera offers perhaps the most sweeping framing of all. For her, building a community is the infrastructure on which everything else flourishes from. Vera Futorjanski: We always say talent is everywhere, opportunities are not.

So I think what is really essential is that we make sure we bring those opportunities to remote areas. We make sure that a young girl in Bangladesh has access, has role models, and has opportunities to grow and become into something that she would love to be. I strongly believe the next Marichuy will not come from a developed country. She will be from a small village in a place that we probably have never heard of.

Nora Hocke: The gains are also systemic. Jacqueline points to AI as both a risk and an opportunity, one that will only pay out if it's built with inclusion baked in from the start. Jacqueline O'Flanagan: When you think about natural language models and natural language processing, where you have individuals who may not have the ability to read or write, who can actually speak into a technology device and get answers almost instantaneously to a world that they didn't have access to previously.

The potential and the magnitude for change is astronomical. And within the financial services segment, this represents over 10 trillion in immediate opportunity for growth within the next three to five years. Annika Melchert: But only if those models are built with the full breadth of human experience and view. When Jacqueline started her career, female representation in the development of large language models sat around 3%.

Today it's closer to 8%. It's progress, but it's not nearly enough. Jacqueline O'Flanagan: We've put in a specific framework for ethical AI to ensure that as these models are being built and the outputs have a clearly ethical perspective and a non-biased perspective. But I still think that there is a tremendous amount of work that needs to be done to ensure that these models have a truly diverse perspective as we go forward.

Nora Hocke: If the evidence for giving and the reality of the gains is this clear, why hasn't it happened faster? Annika Melchert: Vera is clear about the friction still in the system. Vera Futorjanski: Of all globally available funding that's out there for startups, only 2% go to female founders. I feel like every time I need to pause after this, so it really sinks in.

Only two. 2% go to female founders, and that is a shocking number which has to change. It can only change if, of course, we have more female founders out there, but while they have a lot, I don't think that's the issue. We need more female investors, right?

When I was on the investment side, I am an angel investor, I invest in female startups. I try to bring as many women around me into the investment space. You don't need to be rich to be investing. You can start with $1,000, you can be supporting, you can get shares by supporting the startups.

So it really is important that women realize they can diversify the wealth from not just investing and assets they know like real estate, but actually investing in startups. Nora Hocke: Amanda points to a structural gap that technology hasn't yet closed, the space between access and understanding. Amanda Estiverne-Colas: We're at an inflection point in technology, right? We are tapping into AI.

We're actually creating products that remove arewe ar human intervention. Nora Hocke: Amazing. Amanda Estiverne-Colas: There's gentech AI payments. There's all these technologies that are coming out.

And this is now more of a very important time for us to really make sure that are we creating these products to be safe? And are we encouraging financial well-being throughout the process, even without human intervention in some of the products that we're building? It's more now than ever that we need to not only have these progressive conversations, but we need to make sure that inclusive design is part of it. It's this concept that we're thinking about the consumer as we're designing these new tools.

And sometimes I worry about that. We're all tech-focused, which is great, but the human side of finance institutions is that ,we need to remain empathetic to the consumer. Annika Melchert: Reem suggests that structural change start at the policy level, and she sees Saudi Arabia as an unlikely but instructive model. Reem Ikram: The regulators are there to protect the consumers and ultimately, and of course, to regulate the activities, et cetera.

Now, what the Saudi regula-tors, so SAMA and CMA, do is they have a sandbox. Now the sandbox is basically what it sounds like, a testing environment. So instead of saying no to fintechs and everything is not possible because we don't know if that would be safe for people, we don't know the impact. Robo-advisory, for instance, do algorithms work and all of those things.

The regulators say, "All right, let's have a look. How can we come up with an experiment to prove that it is safe or not safe?" And the regulators are in the same loop. Instead of saying no because we don't know.

What they say is, "Okay, maybe. Let's go and see if we can come up with a test. If it works, we can talk again." But the good side is that the regulators are aware of what's happening.

`And if something is happening, how they don't like it, they are of course able to say, "Wait, let's stop it. Can we fix this? Can we fix that? Or let's cease it all together."

And I think this has made innovation, well, hugely possible. Nora Hocke: And all four circle back to the same foundational investment, education. Not as a nice-to-have, but as the load-bearing wall of genuine inclusion. Reem Ikram: Financial literacy is a very broad topic.

I would say that it's really the ability to manage your finances or the ability to budget and plan your goals. Every bank now has marketing out for increasing savings. It's one of the two of the pillars of the financial sector that you want to increase household savings and financial literacy. And I think the awareness that has come across over the last year is absolutely going to drive a massive change in consumer behavior over the next couple of years.

Amanda Estiverne-Colas: One of the things that I really appreciate is there are a lot of fintech organizations that are tapping into the area of financial education, but creating financial education that speaks to its consumers. Nora Hocke: "Give to Gain.", It can sound like a tagline. Annika Melchert: But listening to Amanda, Jacqueline, Reem, and Vera, it feels more personal than that.

Nora Hocke: Each of them has chosen to invest in people, in opportunity, in access, and watched those investments compound over time. Annika Melchert: The fintech industry was built on the premise that technology could democratize finance. These four women are holding that premise out countable and showing us how we can deliver on it. Jacqueline O'Flanagan: Stay curious, stay curious a little bit longer, encourage a growth mindset.

And then, as you start to move through those lived experiences, really define and set your values of who you are, what you want to be, and where you want to go, and how it aligns to the organization. And that will open up tremendous doors. Vera Futorjanski: We are the ancestors of our future. It's really important what kind of future we leave behind.

What I would love to is that we have more space, more opportunity to dream really big, to let our imagination flow. That means bringing diverse people together. I think going back to beyond, why I think that's so important is because only with that diversity can you really create something truly innovative. And one last thing that I would like to say is with all that we do in the world and with everything we're trying to impact, the legacy I want to leave behind, I think it's really important that we don't forget our mental health and our wellbeing, because that's the key for everything.

If we're not healthy, if we're not well, if we don't give enough self-love to ourselves, we can't give love to the world. Nora Hocke: This has been Fintech Files from BCG Platinion, and we hope you enjoyed this very special International Women's Day episode. Annika Melchert: This season, we're digging deep into groundbreaking ideas that are reshaping the future of fintech. We've got some amazing guests lined up, so make sure that you subscribe and never miss an episode.

Nora Hocke: Thank you so much for tuning in. We'll see you next time on Fintech Files.