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

CID Student Ambassador Patrick Hannahan interviews Victoria White, Managing Director of Global Advisory Solutions at Accion. Victoria talks about how Accion and its partners are harnessing key digital trends to make quality financial service more accessible and cost effective in developing countries. Interview recorded on October 27, 2017. // cid.harvard.edu // About the interviewee: 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 and 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. She also worked as a program analyst for USAID’s Office of Microenterprise Development.

Om Podcasten

Incredible progress has been made throughout the world in recent years. However, globalization has failed to deliver on its promises. As problems like unequal access to education and healthcare, environmental degradation, and stretched finances persist, we must continue building on decades of transformative development work. The Center for International Development (CID) is a university-wide center based at the Harvard Kennedy School that seeks to solve these pressing development problems—and many more. At CID, we believe leveraging global talent is the key to enabling development for all. We teach to build capacity, conduct research that guides development policy, and convene talent to advance ideas for a thriving world. Addressing today’s challenges to international development also requires bridging academic expertise with practitioner experience. Through collaborative, in-country partnerships, CID’s research programs, faculty, and students deploy an analytical framework and context-dependent approaches to tackle development problems from all angles, in every region of the globe.