Applying Gender-Intentional Credit Scoring
Virtual Workshop
Evidence shows women often demonstrate higher loan repayment rates than men, suggesting they are lower-risk borrowers and yet face higher barriers to loan approval. This presents an opportunity to refine lending models for more accurate risk assessment and increased financing to women.
CGAP’s latest research shows that, under certain conditions, employing gender-intentional credit scoring can help lenders more accurately measure portfolio risk and not only help reduce the gender gap in access to credit, and allow providers to increase their portfolios or reduce their losses. This virtual workshop was designed for lending service providers, credit risk managers, data scientists, and others working on credit scoring.
In this two-part session, we covered:
- Part 1: Presentation on gender-intentional techniques and implementation strategies for credit scoring
- Part 2: Walk-through of how to implement the analyses using Excel, R, and Python
Presenters
Maria Fernandez Vidal is a Senior Financial Sector Specialist and has led CGAP’s Data team since its establishment in 2020. She leads CGAP’s work on open finance and AI and was the lead author for the Key Considerations for Open Finance, a joint publication by CGAP, the BIS, the IMF, the UNSGSA’s office and the World Bank. Her work focuses on the role of data in advancing financial inclusion and financial health, covering both the public and private sectors. She has also led work on fintech innovation, platforms and advanced analytics.
Before joining CGAP, Maria spent five years at McKinsey & Company advising financial and public sector clients on strategy, risk, operations, and organizational transformation. She previously worked at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Maria holds an MBA from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, with a double major in strategic management and finance, and earned both her undergraduate and graduate degrees in economics from Universidad Torcuato Di Tella.
Dean Caire is a credit scoring consultant. He works with the International Finance Corporation, CGAP, and several international financial services providers. He specializes in development and implementation of credit risk models and training and consultation on risk management. He previously worked at Dai Europe as a risk management specialist. Caire is a Chartered Financial Analyst, he holds a master’s in Finance from the Thunderbird School of Global Management and a bachelor’s from California State University.