For Immediate Release:
Contact: Maura Hart, +1 212 556 3156 or meh@womensworldbanking.org
NEW YORK—Women’s World Banking adds three new senior positions, strengthening the global nonprofit’s leadership in addressing the most critical issues for women’s financial inclusion. With decades of experience in cutting edge technology, human-centered design and strategic partnerships, these three new leaders will help scale innovative, commercially viable financial solutions to meet women’s needs across regions and cultures.
Surjit Chana joins as Executive Vice President of Corporate Engagement & Marketing, Kate Hooper joins as Executive Vice President of Market Research & Solution Development, and Marina Dimova as Managing Director of Design & Innovation.
“I’m thrilled to welcome Surjit, Kate and Marina at such a pivotal moment for Women’s World Banking. Our mission is to harness the strategic partnerships, latest technologies and innovative approaches to make an unprecedented impact on women’s lives. With these exciting new additions to our team, we will be able reach even more cross-sector players and take the lead in applying design thinking and behavioral methods to achieve of our goal of getting more financial products into women’s hands.”
Surjit Chana has had a 30-year career in the private sector with senior roles in technology, strategy, marketing, sales, business development, and operations. He was the Chief Operating Officer of IBM Digital and a member of the IBM senior leadership team. Most recently, he was a Harvard Fellow focused on defining solutions to reduce intergenerational poverty and improve gender equality by empowering women. He will lead Women’s World Banking’s work to scale sustainable solutions to reach the one billion women around the world without access to financial services. By engaging a diverse set of cross-sector partners, this work will engage financial service providers, governmental and international development organizations and philanthropic partners committed to achieving women’s financial inclusion.
“I am thrilled to join Women’s World Banking at this exciting time,” said Chana. “By leveraging digital financial services and driving collaboration with a diverse set of partners we can dramatically improve the lives of low-income women around the world.”
Kate Hooper brings 17 years of experience leading marketing strategy and design for global start-ups to Fortune 200 companies, including Capital One and Wachovia. In addition, she is complementing her behavioral design expertise with an MSC in Behavioral Science from the London School of Economics where her research focus is on unconscious bias. As a passionate advocate for human-centered design and innovation, she will spearhead Women’s World Banking’s research and design capabilities to help banks, mobile network operators and FinTech companies in the emerging markets develop commercially-viable products and services to meet women’s unique needs.
“Women’s World Banking has worked for decades to research all aspects of women’s lives and design financial products to serve them at every stage. I’m so pleased to join the organization and leverage the latest financial service technologies and players to reach women with more well-designed products, channels and services than ever before,” said Hooper.
Marina Dimova joins as a designer with 12 years of experience developing, implementing and scaling innovative solutions to social problems. Prior to joining Women’s World Banking, she was a Vice President at ideas42, a leading behavioral design firm, where she designed, tested and scaled products, processes and programs in consumer finance, international development and financial inclusion. At Women’s World Banking, she will lead efforts to use insights from behavioral science and new technologies to build effective customer-centric products and services for low-income women, and embed these innovations into teams and organizations that can bring these solutions to scale.
“I look forward to embedding customer-centric design and rapid iteration processes into everything Women’s World Banking does, from developing innovative financial products to refining internal knowledge management systems. I believe that more than ever, effective behavioral design is essential for helping millions of women build a stronger financial future for themselves and their families,” said Dimova.
Women’s World Banking team will be featured at its Making Finance Work for Women Summit on October 24-25 in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania to discuss the most pressing issues and solutions for women’s financial inclusion worldwide.
