Staff Directory

Sarah Rotman Parker

Senior Financial Sector Specialist

Sarah Parker currently focuses on CGAP's work on inclusive insurance. Specifically, she is leading the work on inclusive insurance advocacy, measurement, and financial health.

Before returning to CGAP in 2024, Sarah spent seven years at the Financial Health Network, leading their financial health measurement work and starting a new inclusive insurance practice. She was a VP of Customer Insights at Swiss Re, the global reinsurance company, where she leveraged human-centered design and customer insights to build innovative insurance products. She has also worked as a management consultant with Guidehouse. While at CGAP for six years over a decade ago, she managed work on mobile banking and digital finance in francophone West Africa and led global research on electronic G2P payments.

Sarah has a Master's degree in international development from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a Bachelor's degree from Wheaton College.
 

By Sarah Rotman Parker

Blog

Senegal: A Unique Ecosystem of Branchless Banking in West Africa

Ecosystem is a popular word that is increasingly thrown around financial inclusion circles in the last couple years…and for good reason. To provide a range of financial services to various segments of the unbanked population, one provider, one delivery channel and one business model will never be sufficient. As we looked around the conference room at the BCEAO, it was clear that an ecosystem was emerging in Senegal.
Blog

A New Meaning of “Community”: Social Media In Financial Services

Community is now being defined by many as the social knowledge that people are beginning to generate through, yep you guessed it, social media. In developed and developing countries alike, there is a growing cohort of start-ups that are leveraging information people share about themselves on social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Foursquare, using this public information to provide a fuller and more accurate picture of their financial lives to potential financial providers.
Blog

A Trip Around the Corner: Financial Inclusion in the U.S.

Here at CGAP we love to draw global lessons about financial inclusion from our interaction with stakeholders in various countries. But we often neglect learning from the latest innovations in the developed world since we assume that the differences between these countries and the ones we are most interested in are too great. Last year, a few of us attended the annual Underbanked Financial Services Forum organized by the Center for Financial Services Innovation (CFSI) and returned again this year to learn about the latest innovations in the U.S. market.
Blog

From Protection to Inclusion: Shifting to Cashless Payments

All around the world, social protection is evolving into much more than a safety net for the poor. It is becoming a tool for financial inclusion and economic opportunity. Interestingly, stories like these, and the trends behind them, were barely on the radar of the global financial inclusion field three years ago when CGAP published the first official estimate of financially-inclusive G2P payments. Since then, government, donor and NGO efforts to link financial access to government payments has become a swiftly growing movement.
Blog

How Perception and Trust Shape Adoption

How does a company, or in this case – a new player in the financial services market – change the way it is perceived among a new customer segment it is trying to reach with new products and services?