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The Alliance Hack supports fintechs with the potential to scale business solutions to unlock the full power of the female economy.
The Alliance Hack – in its second edition – will leverage the Alliance’s deep expertise in serving the women’s market to support fintechs develop solutions for women business-owners’ access to finance and non-financial services to accelerate their business growth. It will also focus on building the investment capability of mass market women, whether self-employed, employed or home makers. The Hack’s aim is to connect fintechs to incumbent banks who have a strong interest in supporting women customers and drive to the Proof-Of-Concept with a select cohort of banks. B2B, B2B2C and B2C solutions are welcome. The Hack will be judged by a panel of global leaders in the financial services/fintech space and is hosted in partnership with the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and on the APIX platform.
Women represent a huge market opportunity and growing purchasing power, led by trends toward gender parity in education, entrepreneurship, and wealth. 40% of global wealth is held by women. In the US, women make 80% of household buying decisions about where to bank; and yet they are greatly underserved by and highly dissatisfied with the financial services sector. In the SME space, women are starting businesses at greater rates than men and account for 33 percent of small business globally yet account for on average 1/5 of the total financing from banks to SMEs. Brands that can meet this unmet need will have a strong competitive advantage moving forward.
This Hack is focused on financing the missing middle — businesses that fall between traditional SME lending by banks and traditional microfinance by MFIs. This is where the majority of women-owned/led businesses are, and the finance gap in this segment is estimated at US$1.7 trillion in emerging markets for formal businesses alone.
Fintechs are uniquely positioned to embrace this opportunity either by working in partnership with other financial services providers (B2B/B2B2C) or going straight to the consumer (B2C).
