Next goal is boosting fruitful usage of financial services

The difference in inactive bank accounts between men and women is very telling:

Women's World Banking (WWB) is dedicated towards economic empowerment through financial inclusion to the one billion women in the world without access to formal financial services. Using its sophisticated market and consumer research, WWB turns insights into real action to design and advocate for policy engagement, digital financial solutions, workplace leadership programs and gender lens investing. According to WWB 742 million women remain outside the formal financial system today.

Kalpana Ajayan is the Regional Head, South Asia and comes with 25+ years of experience in retail banking and insurance. She has worked at Citibank, HSBC and Edelweiss Financial Services in various roles across functions such as strategy, sales & distribution, HR and customer experience. Kalpana is passionate about supporting women's empowerment and in an individual capacity is a certified mental health counsellor to low-income women and an advisor to key not-for-profits in India.

Mehul Dani: What's your understanding of the level of financial inclusion (FI) among women in India today? Would you say that Fl is becoming mainstream and women are the biggest beneficiaries of those efforts?

Kalpana Ajayan: India has led a successful financial inclusion journey dominated by two parallel efforts. The first is the self-help groups (SHG) and microfinance industry (MFI), which very effectively reached and provided access to credit to low-income customers by leveraging collective social capital. The second, and the more recent, is the PMJDY accounts journey that started in 2014, driven largely by the public sector bank. Today, over 450 million Indians have access to basic banking services, and this is a tremendous achievement. The next logical step is to ensure fruitful usage of and engagement with these services.