A guide to future-proofing for leaders

In a rapidly changing socioeconomic landscape, organizations must continually reassess where to invest, who to partner with, and how to allocate resources as new opportunities emerge.  

For example, the middle class is growing globally; already half of the global population sits within that group. Another billion could join them in the next decade, Wolfgang Fengler, Ph.D., CEO of World Data Lab, explained via data he showcased in a session looking at the new global consumer. This is important, he said, because when people have less income, their purchasing choices are limited; those in the middle class have more spending power. This represents a demographic that businesses can tap into. “They actually start to become your consumers and also use credit cards, which we project at $25 per person per day in terms of spending threshold,” Fengler said. 

With so many people graduating from lower- to middle-income status, financial health and a means to capitalize on new wealth will be key to sustaining those gains. “Are people saving more money? Are they doing their on-time payments? Are they managing their finances on a regular basis?” said Jessica Eting, co-founder and chief operating officer of Flourish Fi, an engagement platform for financial institutions that builds financially healthy habits in individuals. These types of indicators help Flourish Fi to measure financial health, she said.

Financial health, said Jon Huntsman Jr., vice chairman and president of strategic growth at Mastercard, also means having access to capital and new commercial networks to grow wealth. “Implicit in all of that is you climb the ladder, say as a young entrepreneur. Implicit in all of that is you have to be inspired,” he told the audience.

When it comes to both investment and financial health, one group that may have been overlooked is women. Throughout the day, several speakers noted the disparity in access to financial tools for women. Despite that, women are gaining more spending power as organizations, such as microfinance organization Grameen America, offer financial instruments to facilitate business ownership. “From 2019 to 2024 — so that's inclusive of the pandemic — women-run businesses grew at 17.5%. Men-run businesses grew at 5%,” said Andrea Jung, president and CEO of Grameen America, which provides small loans, training, and support to low-income women. Despite this level of growth, women-run businesses don’t get the same level of investment. “If women-owned businesses got the same kind of capital and grew at the same rate, it would create $8 trillion of gross domestic product,” Jung told the audience, showing that they are a worthwhile investment. 

But this is at a time when investment as a whole is dwindling as countries around the world decrease their ODA amid turbulent geopolitics and philanthropies exercise spending caution. Rather than be deterred, the private sector should be mobilized and see the opportunities to invest in new areas, said many attendees.

Andy Kuper, Ph.D., founder and CEO of LeapFrog Investments, which invests in businesses in Africa and Asia, explained that emerging markets don’t have to equate risk. He told of how LeapFrog's companies have been able to provide much-needed insurance products to 200 million people, offering them a social safety net. However, Leapfrog has been able to sell these companies to the likes Prudential Financial, Swiss Re, Standard Chartered, and Fidelity for a profit “because they have seen the need to start moving into the likes of Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia,” said Kuper. “That's where a huge portion of those middle-class consumers are going to come from, so we've seen tremendous, risk-adjusted returns alongside enormous impact.”

Emerging consumers, he said, represent trillions of dollars that can be made — and trillions of lives that can be changed.

Small, locally run businesses are crucial to supporting local economies and communities. But one of the questions at the summit was how these businesses can be scaled up while staying grounded in their values and facing multiple threats, whether from environmental challenges, fluctuating markets, or supply-chain disruption.

Technology is one answer attendees came back to frequently. As artificial intelligence, or AI, and data-gathering technology advances, they can help business owners, regardless of the context, to make smarter decisions that will help them build resilience in uncertain markets. They are also able to support the development of new business ideas in unexpected places.

Rural entrepreneurs, for example, are starting to engage with digital technology, said Bobby Franklin, president and CEO of National Venture Capital Association. In the U.S., a typical innovation center or entrepreneurial hub might be found in California or New York City. Now, places such as Minnesota and Utah are emerging as hotbeds of business development as technology facilitates rural innovation. He shared that in Minnesota, entrepreneurs are using sound waves in a medical setting to destroy tumors noninvasively; while a small company in Utah is using drones to identify and destroy weeds with a laser. In Africa, James Mwangi, Ph.D., group managing director and CEO of Africa-based financial services company Equity Group Holdings, discussed how they hope to help 100 million small scale farmers access the digital economy via mobile phones through the MADE Alliance, a joint initiative between Mastercard and the African Development Bank Group.

Despite its benefits, small businesses in emerging countries remain the most vulnerable to cyberthreats when they do utilize technology. “When it comes to business, you see how more and more [criminal] organizations are targeting small and medium-sized businesses, usually because they don't have the tools and the capabilities to prevent cyber threats,” said Valdecy Urquiza, secretary-general of INTERPOL, in a session on closing the cyber divide. The criminal organizations behind these operations often work in emerging countries because they are less prepared to deal with such threats.

This is why it is important to upskill and educate the future workforce. “If you're investing in a company in rural America that's now going to need people with tech skills, how are you making sure they know the demand there, they know the training program that's relevant, and they can sign up to be a part of that transformation?” posited Julie Gehrki, president of the Walmart Foundation and senior vice president of philanthropy at Walmart, in a session on rural innovation.

Aside from skills, sustainability and scaling of small businesses also rely on partnerships, said Mwangi. “Most businesses [are] built on digital layers or on technology platforms. It's no longer the old brick-and-mortar manufacturing businesses that we all used to do,” he said. “We are now actors in ecosystems … [and] value chains. We populate ecosystems and … value chains as a single business unit, so the only way to complete an ecosystem is collaborations and partnerships.”

A cornerstone theme at the summit was technology: its role in closing the cyber divide, facilitating more access to capital, and building trust. With rapid advances in tech and AI, leaders within development in the business space need to be harnessing them to spur economic growth. 

When it comes to visual AI tools in particular, “if you're not using at least a few ... you're not falling behind the trend; you're missing the next operating system of innovation,” said Drue Kataoka, an expert on the creative possibilities of AI and machine intelligence. She gave examples, such as Comfy UI, Google Images, Pica AI, Sora, Flux, and Octane AI, that leaders could be using within their daily, working lives to visualize the change they want to see in the world.

“Leadership now means seeing the future clearly and showing it in a compelling fashion. By fully embracing visual AI, leaders will unlock superhuman momentum for themselves, for their teams, for their companies, and for the world.”

When it comes to other digital tools, Michael Schlein, president and CEO of Accion, a nonprofit that provides people with financial tools to escape poverty, shared insights from a study — supported by the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth — on 20,000 micro businesses in five emerging markets. It found that for every digital tool adopted by a micro business, their revenue was 10% more likely to grow. “The bad news is it's very early days and there's so much work to do to get these micro and small businesses to adopt these tools,” Schlein told fellow panelists at the “Capital with Conviction” session. Grameen's Jung explained that without technology, the nonprofit would not have been able to disburse $1 billion in 290 days. “We went from all paper, all cash to no paper, no cash, to a cloud-based system to recently a member app,” she said, adding that borrowers can use Grameen’s app to manage their loans. 

Yet, there are still threats that the rise of digital technology, including AI, pose, from the exclusion of certain demographics to the threat of cyber breaches. Sheikh Salman bin Khalifa Al Khalifa, minister of finance and national economy for the Kingdom of Bahrain, shared that the country has “focused on one of the risks of AI being that it would be very concentrated in its economic empowerment.” As such, 50,000 Bahrainis — via the Prince of Bahrain’s Labour Fund, Tamkeen — will be trained in AI to ensure the maximum number of people reap the benefits of AI. Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth's Singh and Al Khalifa also shared a moment on stage to announce a joint collaboration to launch the first Mastercard Strive initiative in Bahrain, which aims to advance financial and digital readiness for small and medium-sized enterprises — the first of its kind in the Middle East.

The threat of cyberattacks is where private and public sectors need to collaborate, Michael Miebach, CEO of Mastercard, told INTERPOL’s Urquiza. “We don't have the cyber workforce or the cyber troops to engage in this constant battle that's going on between the good guys and the bad guys out there. The private sector will not solve this alone. The public sector will not solve it alone,” he said.

After a dynamic summit focused on practical ways in which leadership can be future-proofed amid emerging threats, Singh encouraged the day’s attendees to “bottle up” the day’s energy and take it back to teams that may be overwhelmed by today’s challenges. “They need you to come back to them with some of this knowledge, but they need you to come back and make them feel that we can get through this, that we can be resilient, that uncertainty is also about opportunity,” she told the audience.

A key theme throughout the day was the power of businesses, both big and small, to take action that will support economic advancement. These can be macro or micro and be implemented at the community level to create real change. This is vital now more than ever when the larger systems and traditional players in global development are shifting. But that uncertainty, as several speakers highlighted, is a chance to identify new opportunities for growth at levels not seen before.

Those opportunities could come in the way of partnerships, which Equity Group's Mwangi called “the new leadership.” As a community and in partnership, there are lessons for leaders to follow as they pursue growth, build trust, and navigate the ever-changing operational environment.

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