Claudia McKay

Lead, Green and Resilient Outcomes

Claudia McKay leads CGAP’s work on strengthening the role that financial services play in achieving green and resilient outcomes, especially for women. This includes financial services for climate resilience and adaptation, including both private and public sector solutions, and with a particular emphasis on the nexus between climate, gender and financial inclusion. This also includes financial services to help vulnerable people cope with the many risks and shocks they face through work in highly fragile countries and on inclusive insurance.  
 
Since joining CGAP 12 years ago, Claudia has worked and published on a wide variety of topics, including agent networks, human centered design, effective regulations, interoperability, open APIs and enhancing the livelihoods of platform-based workers through financial services. Claudia has also worked extensively in specific markets to develop inclusive financial ecosystems, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa. 
  
Claudia has over 20 years of development and financial inclusion experience. Before joining CGAP, Claudia spent seven years working for Opportunity International, a global network of microfinance organizations, including four years as head of Microfinance Banking for Opportunity Bank in Malawi. She has also worked as a management consultant with the Boston Consulting Group. 
  
Claudia has a Master’s degree in Business Administration from Oxford University’s Saïd Business School. 

By Claudia McKay

Blog

Getting Better Insights To Design Better Financial Products

Today, CGAP is releasing a synthesis deck which highlights our experiences in product innovation and helps providers understand how they can use customer-centric approaches to improve their offerings.
Blog

Rural vs Urban Mobile Money Use: Insights From Demand-Side Data

The second post in our series described the importance of demand-side data for understanding consumers and their financial habits and needs. Various organizations are contributing to the global pool of demand-side data in branchless banking and in this post we’ll focus on two of the main sources. The Financial Inclusion Tracking Surveys (FITS) are annual household panel surveys in Uganda, Tanzania, and Pakistan while the Tanzania Mobile Money Tracker Study (TMMT) uses quarterly surveys to track market trends. Both are being carried out by InterMedia and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In this post, we’ll highlight some of the analysis on rural and urban households to demonstrate the actionable insights that can be gathered from such datasets.
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The Emerging Landscape of Demand-side Data in Branchless Banking

The second post in a series on the emerging branchless banking data architecture focuses on the demand side of the data equation and attempts to answer questions such as: which clients are using which products for which purpose? What aspects of a service are they satisfied or dissatisfied with? And, perhaps most importantly, is the service having a positive impact on their general well-being?
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Unintentional Consequences: Branchless Banking In Ghana

Ghana should be a ripe market for mobile money. Yet, as CGAP has written about before, the market has been slow to take off. In this post and video, Elly Ohene-Adu, Head of Financial Inclusion at the Central Bank of Ghana, speaks with CGAP about some of the issues with the current regulations and how the BoG is planning to tackle them.
Blog

Tailoring Formal Financial Products for the Poor

In our last post, we shared findings from the South African, Bangladeshi and Indian Financial Diaries that built the case for formal and informal financial services serving different purposes in the portfolios of the poor. We found that the two should be viewed as complements rather than alternatives to each other.