Padmini Gupta, rise

PADMINI GUPTA

Chief Executive Officer

rise

What aspects of rise’s gender empowerment programmes are you most proud of and why?

We are really unique, probably the only one globally, as a financial services company that predominantly serves women customers. We started by building financial services for domestic helpers in the UAE – which represent 1 in 4 women in the country and are some of the most marginalised people in our community.

We started by helping them gain access to bank accounts, get insured, build a retirement plan and get affordable loans. We also initiated the first UAE Best Nanny Awards in 2016 to celebrate this community. We did this to help celebrate the many women who are our everyday superheroes – but are often ashamed to share that they work as domestic helpers with their families back home. We started this to bring recognition to the critical role nannies play in our society, with more than 95% of UAE kids having some percentage of their time spent under nanny supervision.

While we since have come a long way and now serve a large cross section of customers – even beyond the UAE – the small role we could play early on in bringing dignity and recognition to our domestic helpers in the UAE continues to be something, I am personally very proud of.

How has rise encouraged and benefited from women in leadership roles and management positions?

As a company we are more than 25 people strong, but a significant majority of our team continues to be and be led by women. Our marketing, finance, customer service, and sales team are all majority women and woman-led.

What is rise’s vision towards sustainability, and what steps are being taken to achieve rise’s sustainability goals?

How do you engage employees in sustainability efforts? As a professional, I have had a long history of association with sustainability efforts. As a banker, I sat on the board of the San Diego Redevelopment task force in the 2000’s where sustainability was one of the key elements on the agenda. Subsequently, I was a global leadership fellow at the World Economy Forum – where my two areas of focus – urban mobility and climate change, both had significant sustainability elements.

As I began my entrepreneurship journey, how to enable sustainability through our efforts continues to be a key part of our mission. There are two key ways in which we enable sustainability. First and foremost, taking the process of buying financial services fully digital, thereby reducing the need for heavy carbon footprint paperwork. Be it in opening accounts, or buying insurance, or getting credit, this can significantly reduce carbon footprint for people acquiring financial services. Secondly, adopting aggressive remote working practices – even before COVID-19, thereby reducing travel and office space requirements and enabling us to grow more sustainably.

What does women’s empowerment mean to you?

As an entrepreneur in fintech and as a mother, for me personally, women’s empowerment is a fundamental right. One that is central to achieving a prosperous world in which women can determine their own choices, and ability to influence social change for themselves and those around them.

As we celebrate this International Women’s Day on March 8th – the date the Russian Suffrage movement won rights for women to vote in 1917 – and after the year of simultaneous challenges and triumphs, I feel a sense of gratitude to my fellow women leaders, mothers, friends, migrants, they are the light for those around them. Without their light, the world is certainly a darker place.

As an entrepreneur in fintech and as a mother, for me personally, women’s empowerment is a fundamental right.

Do you believe that profitability and environmental sustainability can coexist?

I do believe they can co-exist, and this is in large part already integrated within rise through our business model of financial inclusion and mobile money. 2020 has completely changed global consumption habits and digitised financial services at an unprecedented pace – forcing more transactions to happen digitally and online – with cash transactions discouraged to limit personal contact, which naturally is a far more environmentally sustainable method, where it is possible.

The move to a green cashless society is critical for the MENAP region, as less than one in six adults have access to bank accounts and 85% of all transactions are currently cash based. We at rise believe an environmentally sustainable transition to digital cash for everyone will need to focus not just on making mobile money solutions available to the market but focus on making it usable for the market too.

In short, financial inclusion and mobile money models, such as ours, are evolving to enable everyone everywhere to participate fully in the new digital and environmentally sustainable economy, thus co-existing already.

What are the challenges facing women in leadership?

2020 posed many challenges for women leaders, and I would say that the year has pushed all women to lead in one form or another. Albeit working at the helm of humanity’s response to the pandemic and leading the charge in healthcare as doctors, nurses, and scientists; or be it in education, where 75% of teachers are women. Or even be it at home, where working women took on multifarious roles of leading professionally in their careers, as teachers, and as a caregiver all in one.

Within my industry, women are pushing boundaries and leading success every day. And now, just in the beginning of 2021, we have already seen the IPO of Bumble – both founded and led by a women CEO as well as being a platform targeting the female demographic. But despite the progress we have made, there is much more to be done and much more repair to be carried out to tackle the impact of COVID-19.