CID Speaker Series: Financial Inclusion and the Fintech Revolution: Key Trends Emerging in the New Digital World

Date: 

Friday, October 27, 2017, 12:00pm to 1:00pm

Location: 

Perkins Room - Rubenstein 4th floor - R-429

Victoria WhiteSpeaker: Victoria White, Managing Director, Global Advisory Solutions, Accion

About the talk: Around the world, nearly 3 billion people have little to no access to the formal financial sector. They worry about how to pay school fees for their children, whether there will be enough to eat in the coming weeks, or whether they will be able to afford the medical care needed for a sick relative. For them, lacking access to financial services makes each of these basic transactions extremely challenging. For the past 55 years, Accion has been working with local financial institutions and now more recently with innovative fintech disruptors to change that. The digital revolution is changing nearly every aspect of how we live our lives, including how we bank, borrow and save. Join us for a discussion of how Accion and its partners are harnessing key digital trends to make quality financial services more accessible and cost effective to those who have been excluded.

About the Speaker: Victoria White has worked with Accion since 2000. She serves as a member of the senior management team and holds responsibility for overseeing Accion’s advisory support to its partners as Managing Director, Global Advisory Solutions. She also serves as a board director for a number of these institutions. Previously, Ms. White was Accion’s Regional Head for Asia. In this capacity, she was responsible for Accion’s management and technical services relationships with partner microfinance institutions, as well as for providing oversight of Accion’s investments in Asia. Prior to this, she supported Accion’s partners in Africa in such areas as strategic planning, bank downscaling, institutional transformation planning, and financial management.

Ms. White is co-author of Transforming Microfinance Institutions: Providing Full Financial Services to the Poor and Institutional Metamorphosis: Transformation of Microfinance NGOs into Regulated Financial Institutions, a contributing author to Commercialization of Microfinance: Balancing Business and Development, and author of A Case Study in Transformation: The Creation of Uganda Microfinance Limited.

Before working with Accion, Ms. White was a senior advisor for Calmeadow’s international operations, performing financial evaluations and transformation planning for MFIs throughout Africa. She has also worked as a program analyst for USAID’s Office of Microenterprise Development, both in Washington and in the South Africa mission. Prior to entering the microfinance field, Ms. White was a bank examiner with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Ms. White holds an M.A. in international affairs from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and a B.A. in political science and French from Wellesley College.