Mary Ellen Iskenderian, President and CEO of Women's World Banking, is one of the most compelling voices on where AI consistently gets risk wrong — and what it's costing the industry. She leads the organization's dual approach to systemic change: partnering with institutions and policymakers to fix market failures, and investing equity to build enterprise value and drive returns.

Mary Ellen confronts a challenge the industry can't ignore: AI-driven credit scoring and fraud models, trained on incomplete data, misclassify women as higher risk — even when they're often lower-risk, higher-value customers. That miscalibration leaves an estimated $17 billion credit gap for women founders on the table every year, inside a $700 billion opportunity the sector has yet to capture. Mary Ellen shows banks, fintechs, and investors where the model breaks — and how to fix it before bias locks in, and women lock out, at scale.