Ariadne Plaitakis

Senior Financial Sector Specialist

Ariadne Plaitakis is a Senior Program Officer at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with a focus on regulation. A former CGAP consultant, she is currently based in London with over 20 years of extensive on-hands experience in digital finance and payments regulation, open banking, financial inclusion, privacy/data protection, e-commerce, competition law, and consumer protection in the EU and emerging markets. Her most recent projects for CGAP examined open banking/PSD2, payment interoperability, and competition in digital financial services (DFS). Ariadne is a UK-qualified solicitor with an MA in Jurisprudence from the University of Oxford and a BSc in Foreign Service from Georgetown University, and is fluent in French, German and Greek.

In addition to the publication listed below, Ariadne is also the author of the following three CGAP Background Documents: Modularization of DFS and Competition Issues, Lessons Learned from the Interchange Fees Antitrust Investigations, and Digital Data and Competition Issues.

By Ariadne Plaitakis

Blog

To Reach its Inclusive Potential, Open Finance Needs Data Protection

Open finance gives consumers control over their personal financial data, leading to more suitable and better-targeted financial services. But this ability to move entire financial histories both empowers consumers and poses risks.
Research

Combining Open Finance and Data Protection for Low-Income Consumers

Open finance gives low-income consumers greater control of their personal information, helping make their data work for them, giving them access to more products at lower costs through multiple and easy-to-access channels, and allowing for remote consumer onboarding.

Blog

How Can Data Sharing Support Inclusion?

Data sharing can unlock a number of opportunities for the financial inclusion of poor individuals in EMDEs. To understand how, we must look at the various models of data sharing and how they may result in an inclusive data ecosystem.
Blog

Platform-Based Finance: Are Regulators Up to the Data Protection Task?

As big techs and other platforms ramp up their financial service offerings in emerging markets, regulators can look at developments in advanced economies to get a glimpse into the data protection issues they will need to consider.
Research

Open Banking: How to Design for Financial Inclusion

While many regulators in emerging and developing markets understand the potential benefits of open banking regimes, they are uncertain how to design them in ways that support financial inclusion. CGAP has identified 12 critical design components.