Designing banking products for women is a tricky business. Adopting the so-called 'pink strategy' – tweaking standard products with a female branding veneer – is likely to alienate the target market. But, failure to move at all could be costly, as women's incomes are growing faster than men's and they make a majority of financial decisions. These were the issues discussed at a panel on 'women and the future of banking' during the opening day of the Inter-American Development Bank's (IADB's) annual meeting in Bahia, Brazil.
In years past, a topic such as this would have been dealt with as one of gender inequality and the need to empower women in poor rural areas. It is a sign of how far much of Latin America has developed when the treatment is about women as entrepreneurs, as the owners of small and medium-sized enterprises and as buyers of mortgages.
