Scott Stefanski served as the VP and Program Manager, Digital Strategy and Product Innovation, on Accion’s Global Advisory Solutions team. Scott has dedicated much of his 22-year career as a business and technology strategist, to the pursuit of solutions at the nexus of financial inclusion and digital disruption. This work began with early efforts to introduce mobile technology to emerging markets before addressing issues around bank access, co-creating an early mobile wallet solution and serving as first employee for Ultralight Banking (later branded Obopay). He later focused on merchant challenges and designed solutions to embrace interpersonal transaction behaviors, founding Maana Mobile for the South African market. Scott later expanded his work to address financial needs throughout supply chains, investigating and modeling opportunities to digitize supply chain management and finance practices for the benefit of a broader set of suppliers and merchants.
Along the way, Scott has advised multilateral institutions, foundations and private sector clients in fields of innovation practices, product design, rapid prototyping, business and financial modeling, advising on investments, and interpreting technological trends to define future-facing strategies to better meet the needs of the financially excluded. His efforts have included rapid prototyping consumer instant credit products in Senegal, user-centered product design of a person-to-person digital marketplace in Ghana, and designing and initiating a supply chain management and finance platform for the Tanzanian market. He has conducted market assessments across several African and Asian markets for digital financial services, and worked with mobile operators and banks in multiple African markets to modernize their product development practices to enable more rapid innovation.