It’s a widespread sentiment amongst monetary establishments that goes one thing like: “We’d like to serve low-income ladies, nevertheless it’s simply too pricey.” This assumption that catering to ladies clients inherently undermines profitability has lingered for years. However is it actually true?
We explored this in our analysis and located that practically two-thirds of monetary companies suppliers (FSPs) who participated in our survey disagreed that providing merchandise to low-income clients at scale is “too costly”. But, regardless of this shifting notion, many establishments nonetheless wrestle to construct a enterprise case for women-centric merchandise. However why the disconnect?
The reply lies in product design boundaries, the place inner blind spots and biases can enhance prices. On this weblog publish, we unpack these product design boundaries by the “price delusion,” exploring how an absence of gender knowledge and perception feeds the notion that serving ladies isn’t viable, and the way that delusion, in flip, results in suboptimal product designs that maintain prices excessive and uptake low. The reality we discovered is that girls is usually a worthwhile market–if merchandise are designed proper.
Let’s break down why the “too costly” narrative persists and methods to flip it round.
The “price delusion” and gaps in gender knowledge
Anybody who’s labored within the monetary inclusion area has heard this argument: “small stability accounts and micro-loans don’t repay.” Traditionally, ladies have been thought of clients with low revenue margins who transact in tiny quantities, drive up service prices, and contribute little to the underside line. However our analysis uncovered a essential flaw in that considering. Most establishments lack the info to precisely measure ladies’s profitability within the first place. Girls’s World Banking’s business survey finds that two-thirds of establishments report amassing gender-disaggregated knowledge (GDD), however solely a little bit over half apply a gender lens when utilizing this knowledge for enterprise choices. With out clear gender knowledge, establishments miss out on a enterprise case for serving ladies.
So, why does knowledge matter a lot? As a result of numbers usually inform a unique story than mere assumptions. For instance, an in depth evaluation of over 90 Girls’s World Banking advisory options tasks performed between 2017 and 2024 revealed that girls clients can have greater buyer lifetime worth (CLV) than males when merchandise actually meet their wants. Girls are sometimes extra dependable savers and debtors, which suggests long-term income can outweigh greater upfront prices. But when an establishment isn’t monitoring utilization, compensation, and retention by gender, these advantages keep invisible. Briefly, the underutilization of gender knowledge reinforces the price delusion and creates a vicious cycle. So, breaking this cycle is essential, and it begins with treating gender knowledge as greater than a compliance box-tick. Whereas practically 40% of FSPs report setting targets or dedicating groups to ladies clients, solely 26% incorporate ladies’s views into product design (e.g., by way of person analysis or women-centered design methodology). Until FSPs actively analyze how ladies clients use merchandise and the place ache factors or drop-offs happen, they’ll maintain defaulting to one-size-fits-all designs and miss the methods ladies might be worthwhile with a unique method.
On the flip facet, establishments which have embraced gender knowledge are seeing outcomes. For instance, one of many FSPs that acknowledged the significance of GDD is Lendingkarta fintech firm in India. They accumulate a sturdy gender-disaggregated dataset on their clients and analyze it by a gender lens. This method enabled borrowing from certified ladies candidates at decrease price and strengthened belief with potential ladies clients—demonstrating how gender knowledge can drive each institutional efficiency and buyer uptake.
A number of lacking items in product design
Even with higher knowledge, solely 26% of suppliers in our business survey mentioned they incorporate ladies’s views in product design. And, this isn’t about gender-siloed merchandise (like a particular “pink” product); it’s about on a regular basis design selections. These are issues like an overdraft product would possibly fail ladies if it doesn’t think about that some ladies have irregular revenue flows, requiring extra versatile compensation schedules. Or a advertising marketing campaign would possibly flop as a result of it makes use of imagery and language that don’t converse to ladies’s wants.
Listed below are some examples. Girls’s World Banking advisory undertaking with Financial institution of Baroda in India discovered that ladies with primary Jan Dhan accounts weren’t utilizing them to avoid wasting. We dug additional and discovered ladies felt their “small” deposits weren’t welcome on the financial institution. The product wasn’t inherently flawed, however the positioning and frontline interactions signaled to ladies that they didn’t belong. Different comparable tales are that if advertising algorithms or frontline workers inadvertently favor males, fewer ladies even enter the funnel to scale a product. Or, if the onboarding course of have been onerous (e.g., a number of paperwork requiring a husband’s signature or a number of ID proofs), ladies usually tend to abandon the applying, leaving accounts underutilized.
So, is it that girls are pricey to serve, or that merchandise have been pricey by institutional design? Our findings counsel the latter. Contemplate digital monetary companies the place many suppliers assumed ladies “weren’t ” in cellular banking, however in reality, interfaces and help weren’t tailor-made to ladies’s decrease digital familiarity. The consequence? Girls stayed away, and suppliers noticed low adoption (which they interpreted as unprofitable to pursue). In Pakistan, a Girls’s World Banking undertaking with JazzCash tackled this by introducing feminine brokers and simplified cellular pockets onboarding for ladies. The end result was a spike in ladies’s enrollment with 566 new clients, 42% of whom have been ladies. This exhibits that when merchandise account for ladies’s wants and capabilities, ladies reply with uptake and loyalty.
Realigning the enterprise case
So, is it too costly to serve low-income ladies clients? Not when you do it deliberately. Sure, it’d require upfront funding, corresponding to amassing gender knowledge, conducting person analysis, coaching workers, or adjusting merchandise. However these investments trump the true boundaries (knowledge gaps, design misfits, belief deficits) quite than papering them over. And the proof suggests they repay. By incorporating these into the establishment’s enterprise technique and operations, suppliers can obtain each monetary sustainability and ladies’s inclusion. The underside line: ladies signify an enormous, underserved market, and designing merchandise with ladies in thoughts is the important thing to unlocking it.
To study extra about Girls’s World Banking’s analysis on boundaries to ladies’s monetary inclusion, keep tuned for the launch of the microsite coming on the finish of March 2026. The microsite consists of the total write-up and exemplars on boundaries to ladies’s monetary inclusion.
This analysis was made attainable with funding from the Gates Basis.
