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

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.
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.