Mumbai, Mar 11: Despite India’s rapidly expanding financial services sector, women across the country continue to face significant barriers to economic participation not just structural, but communicative. Experts are now pointing to a critical failure by brands and marketers to address women as serious financial decision-makers, leaving a wide literacy and engagement gap unaddressed.
Neil Borate, the former editor at Mint and a leading voice in Indian personal finance journalism, has highlighted systemic neglect by financial brands when it comes to women readers from their lack of gender-sensitive investment education, to marketers taking the lazy default of opting for tokenistic empowerment messages over meaningful content.
“Women’s Day becomes this marketing moment full of campaigns, posts and all these things going on but there isn’t a meaningful dialogue that ever happens about money and independence,” said Khushboo Mulani, founder of the Mumbai-based creative agency Slay Media, who included Borate in the conversation as part of a broader push to interrogate the issue.
A Gap with Commercial Consequences
The conversation identifies three compounding problems. First, the near-absence of financial education tailored to women’s specific life stages, income patterns, and risk profiles – leaving campaigns without authentic engagement hooks. Second, structural barriers around investment access and the career-to-wealth pipeline that brands rarely acknowledge, let alone address. Third, and perhaps most actionably for the industry: the largely untapped opportunity for fintech and consumer brands to build deep, lasting loyalty by meeting women where they actually are financially.
Borate’s analysis suggests this is not a niche concern. As more Indian women enter the workforce, inherit assets, and manage household finances independently, the demand for relevant financial content and products is growing – while the supply of genuinely useful brand communication remains thin.
Beyond Tokenism
Critics of current industry practice argue that most Women’s Day-adjacent campaigns by financial brands lean heavily on aspiration and imagery while avoiding the harder, more useful conversations around savings rates, insurance, equity investment, and retirement planning topics that research consistently shows women want more accessible guidance on.
This isn’t just a slogan it’s structure and strategy. Brands that crack the code on women and money, will be spearheading India’s next wave of advertising,” stated Mulani. The problem has implications outside of marketing. The gaps in financial literacy compound over time (in terms of wealth, negotiating power, retirement security and economic independence) at scale if women are not confident about finances from an earlier stage, those insecurities will carry through to adulthood. Brands, by their very nature and trusted position with consumers, should have both the opportunity — and responsibility to do more than celebrate, advocates argue.
