The following information is draw from an Alliance for Financial inclusion (AFI)-funded project in which ACCESS supported the National Bank of Cambodia to implement SDD in 2022.
A. Concept and background to SDD
Due to social norms, family responsibilities, and their responsibility for overall household financial management, women’s financial service needs differ from men. Most financial service providers (FSPs) do not take these different needs into account when designing product features and delivery processes. In fact, many FSPs consider women to be less valuable than male customers, and therefore do not invest in understanding and meeting their needs. At the same time, government officials do not have enough information about women’s place in the financial system to design policies and regulations.
To address these gaps, sex-disaggregated data is needed:
- To enable policymakers to identify gender gaps, formulate of policies to accelerate women’s financial inclusion, and monitor progress toward inclusion goals
- To enable financial sector supervisors to monitor FSP compliance with regulations
- To encourage financial institutions to segment their clients by gender and identify business opportunities among women (e.g., through product bundling, strengthening of delivery channels, etc.)
B. Developing an SDD framework
The SDD framework outlines the system for collecting and using SDD:
- Identifying what data to collect
- Regulations and systems for collecting data
- Processes for analyzing and using the data
The general steps to develop an SDD framework are:
- Current state assessment: analysis of the availability of SDD data for credit, savings, payments, insurance, non-financial services, SME ownership, and FSP staff
- Gap analysis, including capacity of FSP information systems to generate data (and how frequently)
- Almost all FSPs and credit bureaus track the sex of their clients. They can usually generate SDD on account ownership by product
- However, this information is not necessarily accurate due to:
- Accounts with co-owners (husband & wife)––near clear who is the real user
- Clients with multiple loans or savings accounts
- FSPs and credit bureaus do not capture data on the gender of the owners of businesses, co-borrowers/guarantors, or participants in non-financial services in their information systems
- Regulatory silos can leave some important data outside the framework (e.g., financial services by cooperatives, insurance companies, and mobile payment operators)
- Smaller FSPs may not be able to generate monthly data (non-automated systems)
- A contributing factor to the challenges in generating SDD is that there may be no legal or regulatory definition of a women-owned SME (as determined by gender breakdown of ownership stakes and/or the composition of the board of directors and managers). This prevents FSPs from being able to collect such data
- Draft recommendations for SDD reporting framework and templates
- Recommendations must balance data requirements with the feasibility of collecting it
- Consultations and stakeholder workshops to review and finalize recommendations
- Follow up with FSPs on data gaps to confirm they are able to provide required data
- Generate buy-in among FSPs
- Development of SDD reporting implementation roadmap
- Draft reporting templates
- Implementation timeline
- Capacity building of regulator
- Gender awareness
- Definitions in the reporting templates
- Protocols for data analysis, usage, and dissemination
- SDD implementing regulations
This process should take about three months to complete.
C. General roadmap to implementing SDD reporting system
One the draft reporting templates are designed, the regulator should develop an implementation plan based on how quickly they think supervised institutions can comply. This process can take 6-12 months, depending on the length of the grace period.