Betty Wilkinson

Betty Wilkinson
Financial Sector Deepening (FSD) Zambia

Betty Wilkinson is the Chief Executive Officer of Financial Sector Deepening Zambia, a development organization committed to expanding financial inclusion and innovation. She is an innovative leader in economic development and inclusive growth, with over thirty years of senior professional field experience worldwide building and managing high-performance multinational teams.

She engages regularly with ministers, central bank governors, and leaders globally, using a participatory, inclusive style to successfully engage reform champions and produce results. Ms. Wilkinson writes, speaks, and contributes internationally to work in financial inclusion, the digital economy, public management, pro-poor growth, client-centricity, and gender issues. She has worked as an entrepreneur, banker, donor representative, field researcher, policy advisor, CEO, and senior government official of a developing country, with significant depth in fundraising and understanding of the donor community. As CEO of Financial Sector Deepening Zambia she manages 26 staff to expand financial inclusion through learning/innovation with clients, regulators, and financial service providers.

Recent engagement areas include Making Money Work for the Poor approaches, gender and youth economic inclusion, biometric identities, multi-regulatory approaches to mobile money and fintechs, public-private partnerships for data, national digitization of G2P and P2G subsidies, weather-based crop microinsurance rollout to over 1 million smallholder farmers and use of chiefs and other traditional leaders (by their request) to create new options for financial inclusion, growth and social change.