Vanina Vincensini - Business Development Director

Vanina Vincensini is Ayani’s Business Development Director and a development professional with 13 years of experience advising donors and financial institutions with research and analytics services. As a technical expert, she produces research and knowledge pieces for development finance organizations, including the World Bank, IFC, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, EIB, UNCDF and USAID on topics such as SME finance, digital financial services and financial inclusion more broadly. For example, she helped capture 20 years of lessons learned from IFC’s SME finance work in Sub-Saharan Africa; and mapped digital finance and branchless banking ecosystems from 10 African countries.

Vanina also spent 10 years providing direct capacity building assistance to Banks, MFIs, MNOs, DFS providers and insurance companies as Market Research and Analytics Lead Consultant. For example, she managed quantitative and qualitative research projects covering user experience, activity levels, drivers of uptake and regular use, customer profiles and banking agent behaviors in Nigeria, Rwanda, Kenya, India, Bangladesh, Peru and Mexico. She has also assessed client value of micro-insurance products and researched customer empowerment in the use of digital and branchless banking services. In total, Ms. Vincensini has supported over 50 financial service providers via research, data analytics and credit scoring advisory services, and managed multi-cultural teams of up to 15 consultants. She is a Fulbright Scholar, has a Master of Public Policy from the University of Chicago, and a Master in Public Administration from the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris (Sciences-po). A native French speaker, she works in English, French, Portuguese and Spanish.