Kate McKee formerly led CGAP’s initiative on responsible digital finance, which seeks to ensure transparency and safety for customers through forward-thinking industry standards and proportional regulation. She also led policy and advisory work on consumer protection, including recent published guidance on supervision, recourse, policy options to prevent debt stress, and application of behavioral research insights to consumer protection policy and regulation. This work draws on diagnostic and advisory partnerships with regulators in diverse countries including Ghana, Mexico, Senegal, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Kenya. In addition, Kate led the Graduating the Poor into Sustainable Livelihoods initiative, which promotes scaling up of a holistic model that has achieved rigorously-documented gains in income, consumption, assets, and other aspects of well-being for participating extreme poor households in multiple countries around the world.
Following assignments with the Ford Foundation in West Africa and New York (livelihoods, finance, gender, civil society, and agriculture), Kate worked for 12 years in delivery of innovative financial services in the United States, including leading the team that started up a new federal initiative to finance Community Development Financial Institutions. She then headed up the Microenterprise Development office at the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which provided technical guidance to 70+ country programs in microfinance and enterprise development. Kate is a development economist (MPIA Princeton University). Among other board and policy positions, she chaired the Consumer Advisory Council of the U.S. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve (Central Bank). She has published in the areas of policy and regulation, financial services innovation, housing and community development finance, enterprise development, and gender.