Gayatri Murthy

Senior Financial Sector Specialist

Gayatri Murthy leads CGAP’s work on building country-level approaches to improving women’s financial inclusion. Previously she led work on platform worker livelihoods and inclusive fintech. Her work has focused on improving research methods to better understand the lives of low-income people, so that emerging insights better transform policy, private sector and funding. She also specializes in training financial institutions to build customer-centric business models and has trained staff of financial institutions in workshops around the world, including at trainings organized by the Boulder Institute for Microfinance, the Social Performance Task Force, and the Aga Khan Agency for Microfinance.

Before joining CGAP, Gayatri worked for 6 years in market research in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. She began her career at GiveIndia, a platform to promote efficient and effective giving in India.

Gayatri has a Master’s degree in International Communication from the School of International Service at American University in Washington, D.C., and a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai, India. She is fluent in Hindi

By Gayatri Murthy

Blog

FinTech Partnerships: Choose Carefully, Then Evolve

FinTech startups in developing markets are leveraging partnerships to reach customers as diverse as women's savings groups, dairy cooperatives and smallholder farmers.
Blog

FinTech for the Poor: Not All Virtual, Not All Apps

FinTech isn't always about rolling out a dazzling new smartphone app. In places where USSD phones are the norm, it means something quite different.
Blog

A Mobile Money App That Helps Poor Customers Strategize

A mobile money app prototyped by CGAP has customizable features, such as image-based wallets, that allow customers to personalize the app and be their own financial strategists.
Research

Customer Empowerment in Finance

Financial services providers for low-income customers typically believe that their business case is based on expanding the number of accounts or the number of transactions made by these customers. This is only part of the equation to business success.
Research

Money, Decisions, and Control

Advances in digital technologies and the increased availability of data can be used to support low-income customers to do more than make payments. These advances can help them to make financial decisions and develop strategies to manage their finances.