FSDF e-Campus events & more

Join Our Upcoming Webinar Series!

We’re excited to announce a series of webinars starting on December 5th and running through the end of February 2025. Participation is completely free.

Don’t miss out! Register below to secure your spot.

February 6th, 2025 | 7 Reasons why nature is material to your business - and what to do about it.

In this webinar we will take you on an journey across three major fields:

Overview about the macro and micro economics of nature
Approaches to assess nature impacts, risks, and opportunities
Pointers to build your own nature-positive strategy: data, process, people

Date: February 6th, 2025

Time: 1 - 2 PM

Speaker: Steffen Müller

Steffen Müller is an experienced C-Level advisor in the nexus of sustainability, technology, and corporate strategy. He leads the tech and sustainability advisory of a global software company, lectures on biodiversity finance at Frankfurt School of Finance, and sits on the board of Bitkom's "Digitalization and Sustainability" committee.

Register here

February 13th, 2025 | Bridging Technology and Human Touch: Enhancing SME Finance through trust-based relationships, in-depth knowledge of the entrepreneur and Customer Relationship Management systems (CRMs)

The webinar will cover the following topics:

The Role of SME Relationship managers: Balancing empathy and efficiency, business development and risk analysis, hard skills and soft skills.
CRM as an Enabler: How technology can enhance—not replace—the personal touch in SME relationship management.

Date: February 13th, 2025

Time: 2 - 3 PM (CET)

Speaker: François RANCOURT

Register here

Stay tuned! Additional webinars will be announced here shortly.

Past Webinars

December 5th, 2024 | Regenerative agriculture

Regenerative agriculture is farming with a focus on nature conservation and rehabilitation. It aims to increase biodiversity and resilience to climate change, improve soil quality and water cycles, enhance ecosystem services, and support bio-sequestration (capturing carbon dioxide in soils and plants). Regenerative agriculture combines a variety of sustainable agriculture techniques, such as holistic land management, agroforestry, organic farming and zero-tillage. Large corporates of the food and beverage sector are increasingly interested to buy raw materials produced in regenerative farming systems. PepsiCo, for instance, announced in 2021 that by 2030 they will work with the farmers in their supply chain to establish regenerative agriculture practices covering approximately 7 million acres. Similarly, Unilever and Nestle intend to invest in regenerative agriculture supply chains.

In this webinar we will investigate the various business opportunities for farmers and agribusinesses engaging in regenerative practices and the financial instruments that they may help them on their way.

Date: December 5th

Time: 2- 3 PM (CET)

Speaker: Helmut Grossmann

December 12th, 2024 | Innovation in Financial Inclusion: Policy Considerations

After a decade of successful efforts, 700 million people have been brought into the formal financial system by 2021. Yet, 1.4 billion adults remain excluded. Many of them living on less than $5.5/day, in fragile countries, or remote areas (Findex, 2021), making further advancements in financial inclusion particularly challenging.

Innovation represents an opportunity to accelerate financial inclusion, including of the hardest-to-reach customer segments. Innovations such as digital ID systems, open finance, tokenization of assets, alternative credit scoring that uses artificial intelligence, parametric insurance using Internet-of-Things etc. hold promise to address some of the most difficult financial inclusion challenges (see, e.g., Zetterli 2021).

However, innovations come at a fast pace and with multifaceted risks. First, customer risks in terms of potential harm and increased exclusion. CGAP has identified over 60 consumer risks, some of which have either increased in scale over the past few years or are entirely new (e.g., synthetic identity fraud, biometric identity breach – see Chalwe-Mulenga and Duflos 2021). Innovations may also be slow to reach excluded customers, further widening the digital (and financial) gap.

Second, innovations come with risks to the stability and integrity of the financial sector, and challenges for financial sector policymakers, regulators, and supervisors. What is the role of policymakers vis-à-vis innovation? How can they harness innovation to advance financial inclusion without increasing risks of negative impact on other policy objectives? How can they build capacity to better keep up with the fast-moving pace of digital finance?

In this webinar, Ivo Jeník from CGAP – a financial inlcusion think tank hosted by the World Bank – will share recent updates on the financial inlcusion developments, the role of innovation in advancing financial inlcusion and the ways financial sector policymakers can facilitate the process.

Date: December 12th

Time: 2- 3 PM (CET)

Speaker: Ivo Jeník

January 16th, 2025 | How to integrate Climate Risk Drivers into the Risk Management Framework for MSME Finance

How to integrate Climate Risk Drivers into the Risk Management Framework for MSME Finance.

Should MSME finance providers in emerging markets tune out the climate risk debate as just another luxury problem? Absolutely not, this issue is real. We already know that climate change is hitting small businesses and vulnerable clients in developing countries first and hardest.

So, how can we take climate risk into account and continue our Inclusive Finance mission? The BCBS guidance is actually an excellent and practical starting point. It is all about portfolio stress testing to highlight climate risk hot spots but also to identify resilient sectors and business models. As always, this journey starts with data: about the who, what, where and how of your clients and the changing climate conditions in your market.

Date: January 16th, 2025

Time: 3 - 4 PM (CET)

Speaker: Joachim Bald