Kate Pender, Fair4All Finance: financial inclusion, innovation and big solutions to big challenges

Kate Pender is CEO of Fair4All Finance, an organisation launched to improve the financial services sector so it better serves people who are underserved and excluded.

She was appointed chief executive in 2024 having worked with Fair4All since its inception in 2019: "I drank the Kool-Aid and got hooked on the work." Kate is also a member of the Government's financial inclusion committee. She describes Fair4All's evolving work and covers:

• three highlights of its research in 2024 with fascinating implications about the potential to support social purpose lenders via sustained subsidy and about testing different types of guarantee

• advocacy for community development finance institutions (CDFIs) and supporting innovation

• the No Interest Loans Scheme pilot

• using guarantees to lever additional capital

• the importance of "hearts and minds" stories to enable co-investment and partnership

• the scale of the addressable market, customer journeys and "green shoots" on referrals from the banking sector to CDFIs

• the need for regulatory clarity to catalyse concerted change across financial services

• how Fair4All balances impact and risk tolerance when investing in organisations which support underserved people

• Kate's career before Fair4All, including supporting small businesses to grow

• the challenges Fair4All has faced as a young organisation

• tips for anyone taking up a CEO role as an internal candidate

• the potential impact of a National Financial Inclusion Strategy

• how Fair4All will continue to support CDFIs and credit unions and its key priorities for 2025

We interviewed Kate in December 2024 for this podcast, published in January 2025.

What next?

• More about Fair4AllFinance: https://fair4allfinance.org.uk

• More about Responsible Finance and our member CDFIs: https://responsiblefinance.org.uk