NEOBANKS OF THE WORLD: SOUTH AMERICA
Over the past century, women have campaigned hard for gender equality. It’s now constitutionally recognised in 143 out of the world’s 195 countries. But that doesn’t mean discrimination doesn’t persist – financial discrimination in particular. Worldwide, more women are joining the workforce than ever before. According to the World Bank, between 1990 and 2019, the number employed in Brazil increased to 54 per cent of the adult female population. In Bangladesh, it went from 25 to 36 per cent. And in Qatar, from 42 to 59 per cent. And yet, despite this apparent accumulation of female purchasing and saving power, many women – 42 per cent – have zero access to an account with a formal financial institution. That’s according to UN Women, the United Nations entity dedicated to gender equality and female empowerment. While it acknowledges that 35 per cent of men are similarly disadvantaged, for women, financial exclusion has particular, even life-threatening, consequences. Psychologist and fintech entrepreneur Dr Vanise Zimmer has spent years working with women’s groups, researching the consequences of financial exclusion, and
Dr Vanise Zimmer, founder of Elas, a bank designed to empower women in Brazil, hopes her fintech’s legacy will be a new, confident and financially independent generation draws a direct line between it and domestic abuse, particularly in her own country of Brazil where it’s estimated that, every two minutes, a woman suffers an act of violence from a partner. More than 1,200 of those attacks were fatal in 2018, according to the Brazilian Public Security Forum. Because women must rely on the men they live with to take out a mortgage or sign a rental agreement, ‘when they suffer violence they cannot leave the house, because they will lose everything’, says Zimmer. So, she set out to do something about it. Zimmer founded Elas, a neobank that was built specifically to give women the financial independence that buys them freedom from abuse and helps them to build a better life. Elas is the plural of ‘she’ in Portuguese, and Zimmer wants to leverage the power of this fintech as a tool for social justice: to help end financial instability,
economic dependence – and domestic violence – experienced by women. “I studied for a bachelor’s degree in psychology and then, for my masters, I started looking at gender equality. I was invited to Germany to help to construct the first women’s international university,” says Zimmer. “I researched gender and finance and I saw few women in that industry. That made me really worried.” That is particularly the case in investment and wealth management. In private equity, only six per cent of senior positions are held by women. It’s the same story in venture capital funds, where just nine per cent of senior seats are occupied by women. For hedge funds, that number is 11 per cent. While much of society has moved on, somehow finance never stopped being a man’s world. It means that financial products and services are built mainly by men, for men. Elas is different. It’s designed by a woman, for women – although men, says Zimmer, are welcome to join. Zimmer’s first challenge was to address the glaring gap in financial literacy that exists especially among the poorest women in Brazil, who don’t see the need for a bank account. “When they work in the informal labour market, women do not get money deposited in a bank account, they get
What she really, really wants
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ThePaytechMagazine | Issue 6
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