Objective

To ensure everyone benefits from a growing digital economy, we are fostering inclusive economic growth through programs, solutions and partnerships. This way, people everywhere can move along the path from financial inclusion and access to financial health.

Our 2025 Inclusive Growth Summits, held in Washington, D.C. in April and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in October, brought together global and regional leaders driving a more inclusive economy and society. The summits convene leaders working towards a scalable vision of sustainable and inclusive economic growth.

Our summits achieved three key objectives:

1) SPARKING INNOVATIVE CONVERSATIONS

To create change, we must think differently. Providing a forum for innovative conversations among inclusive growth leaders is essential for incubating new ideas that turn into action: creating and shaping new research, policies and practices.

2) STRENGTHENING LOCAL AND GLOBAL PARTNERSHIPS

Inclusive growth cannot happen in silos. Our model for inclusive growth at Mastercard hinges on partnership between the public, private and social sectors, bringing together the best of all worlds to share knowledge and create, iterate and scale effective solutions. Our summits are a key moment for cross-sector collaboration and action across the world.

3) CONNECTING AND ELEVATING INFLUENTIAL VOICES

At these convenings, we elevate frontline practitioners alongside high-profile leaders and celebrity voices, bringing much-needed attention to inclusive growth leaders, programs and impact. At the Summits, our driving principle is that anyone in the audience could also be on the stage, as we seek to bring together the best and the brightest in the field.

Strategy

Having hosted the Global Inclusive Growth Summit (#GIGS25) in Washington D.C. annually since 2019, we sought to bring the summit to the next level by extending it to southeast Asia. For the first time, we hosted the ASEAN Inclusive Growth Summit (#AIGS25) in Kuala Lumpur), timed to the 47th ASEAN Summit.

For our D.C. summit, we brought our global network of grantees and speakers together at a point of external changes and uncertainty, working closely with individual invitees to ensure safeguards around their travel to the U.S. Following the event, attendees shared their gratitude around maintaining a safe and committed space for the inclusive economic growth discussion – a bright spot in an otherwise tenuous climate.

For our Kuala Lumpur summit, our challenge was bringing our event to an entirely new market, working with new partners to reach a regional audience as part of our 3-year partnership with ASEAN-BAC. We engaged our local Mastercard team and their vendor partners to ensure programming and attendance was inclusive of all countries represented by ASEAN, and that the content was culturally and regionally relevant; while maintaining the Mastercard and Center brand and feel. While we oringially struggled to draw in audiences given our limited foothold in the region and other conflicting events tied to the 47th ASEAN Summit, our region-specific audience engagement efforts and outreach ended up exceeding our attendance goal of 200 to a 700+ person event.

For both summits, we activated an integrated event production and marketing plan supported by internal teams and external agency partners. Workstreams and highlights included:

• Agenda curation and speaker panel development, hosting 25 GIGS + 28 AIGS mainstage panels
• Speaker contracts and logistics, managing 68 GIGS + 64 AIGS speakers
• Onsite guest experience, hosting over 650 GIGS + 700 AIGS attendees. Event programming also included:
  • Grantee Learning Convenings, bringing together hundreds of global grantees from across our network to share learnings and insights, and find joint progress on current and new programs.
  • Small business marketplaces, featuring local vendors from our Mastercard Strive grantee network so they can extend the reach of their products to new audiences
  • Solutions hubs, showcasing our technology and products that aim to support economic and inclusive growth for individuals and small businesses around the world
• Event app creation, hosting our event agenda and speaker/attendee directories
• Website content, including speaker announcements, agenda, photo and on-demand video galleries
• Email marketing, including pre- and post-event promotional emails to subscriber list
• Organic and paid social media, including full-length session recordings, short-form speaker panel social media clips, content studio interviews with speakers and grantees and live on-the-ground stories and sizzle reels
• Targeted and ongoing media engagement, including messaging pull through for the event in key outlets such as CNBC SquawkBox Asia, The Straits Times, Harvard Business Review, Mission Matters and others.
• Owned content on our Mastercard Newsroom, showcasing top highlights from each event
• Media partnerships, including a promotional partnership with Devex across email, web, podcast, blog and social media
• SEM
• Internal employee communications and engagement, including in-person watch parties and features on our employee intranet

Results

1. We sparked innovative conversations on financial health, digital transformation, sustainability, cyber resilience, SME-led innovation and more through 53 mainstage panels, roundtable convenings, workshops and dinners. These conversations carried beyond the physical summits, with 7.4M total social media impressions (including clips from the panels), 46K website views, and top-tier media coverage including The Straits Times, CNBC Squawk Box and Harvard Business Review.
2. We strengthened numerous local and global partnerships, including:
   • Launched Mastercard Strive in the Middle East, bringing the depth of the Center’s small business expertise to the Kingdom of Bahrain.
   • Engaged 80+ public sector and multilateral guests to build trust with governments including ADB, Kingdom of Bahrain, EU, IMF, U.S. Department of State, UNSGSA, INTERPOL, Asian Development Bank, European Central Bank and more.
   • Developed a strategic new grant relationship with Heartland Forward, highlighting our commitment to U.S. rural communities.
   • Announced expanded credit for 200,000 MSMEs in the Philippines via $30M financing and a $150K grant to Mastercard client Fuse Financing
   • Advanced research with a $3.5M grant to the Tech For Good Institute with Grab
   • Supported sustainable tourism innovation through Temasek’s Impact Amplifier winners.
3. Finally, we connected and elevated influential voices by inviting a diverse range of speakers and attendees. From the CEOs of Singapore Airlines and Grab to celebrities like Viola Davis and Amal Clooney, to policymakers like the Government of Malaysia’s Minister of Digital, to social entrepreneurs and NGO leaders, we ensured all voices working toward inclusive economic growth had a seat at the table.

Media