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

Côte d’Ivoire: A Perfect Time for Mobile Money?

Côte d’Ivoire has seen its mobile money industry make significant progress in recent years. The latest results from the sector suggest good prospects moving forward. At the end of Q3 2012, there were 2.6 million registered mobile money clients across all providers in the market. This post explores the recent market dynamic in this west African country.
Blog

The Implications of Data Tracking on Financial Inclusion

This debate over internet data tracking has important implications for financial inclusion and in particular new channels like mobile banking that are expanding access to finance to consumers in low-access markets. Some see the end business model for these channels as providing low-cost or free services to consumers, making their profits instead by selling their data to companies looking to offer these consumers tailored products. In this post, we present two different viewpoints from Rafe Mazer, who focuses on financial consumer protection, and Sarah Rotman, who focuses on product innovation.
Blog

Savings and Credit on Mobile: The Jipange KuSave Experiment

The results of an experiment with a lend-to-save model in Kenya, Jipange KuSave, showed that there is demand for financial services which are quite different from those currently offered by mainstream providers.
Research

The Jipange KuSave Experiment in Kenya

This Brief highlights the experience of Jipange KuSave, the mobile version of P9 designed to work over the M-PESA system.
Blog

INOVA: Oasis of Innovation in the West African Desert

INOVA is the first e-money issuer authorized by the central bank in Burkina Faso to offer services of its kind. It is the first company to have a top-notch platform for the Inovapay wallet developed and implemented in the developing world, offering services that are multi-channel, multi-operator, multi-currency, multi-lingual, and multi-institutional.