9 lessons on inclusion, influence and trust in the digital economy
April 25, 2025 | By Vicki Hyman
Whether they build policy or code, companies or communities, the 400 leaders gathered in Washington, D.C., this week for the 2025 Global Inclusive Growth Summit all shared a mission – to explore new ways to grow opportunities and build resilience for all.
“No one has a monopoly on good ideas,” said Shamina Singh, the founder and president of Mastercard's Center for Inclusive Growth, which hosted the annual gathering. “By taking pieces of everything from everywhere — mashing up the best ideas from the social sector leaders, private business artists, futurists and historians — we arrive at answers, we show up, and then we move to action."
Here are some of the insights shared over the course of the day, from the business case for inclusive growth to the need to fortify trust in the digital economy in the age of AI to the value of authenticity.
Shamina Singh opens the Global Inclusive Growth Summit with a charge for participants: "This is a place where big, bold ideas get born, and you are the ones that will take them forward."
“These business models that Mastercard has is built on relatively small transactions but engaged many times by many tens or hundreds of millions of people. These are the business models that are owning the future. And so we should stop looking there and saying, ‘Oh, poverty, yuck,’ and start saying, look at those billions of emerging consumers and trillions of transactions. And as a result, trillions of dollars that can be made and the number of lives that can be changed."
— Andy Kuper, founder and chief executive officer, LeapFrog Investments, on how to meet the demands of an economy being transformed by digitization.
"The beauty of this inflection point we're in is that you have a willingness across an ecosystem to take the history, longevity and consistency of financial markets, marry it with modern-day tech and really get the best of both worlds. The scale and ubiquity and cross-border nature of the work that's already been done to create our financial infrastructure can take a nascent currency and turn it on fire.”
— Linda Kirkpatrick, Americas president, Mastercard, on harnessing the potential of — and building trust in — digital assets and blockchain.
"Probably the number one question I get is, ‘What in the world can you do with $2,500 in the United States of America? You can start a business. We have 240,000 stories of people who've been able to have financial, not just stability, but mobility."
— Andrea Jung, president and chief executive officer of Grameen America, challenging the belief that financial returns and social impact are mutually exclusive.
“It's teaching them how to manage cyber risk like they would any other risk to their business … They can have an educated conversation with their accountant on their finances, but as soon as you start to talk to them about their use of technology, or you say the dreaded cyber word, then sometimes they can kind of glaze over. So we really hold their hand and walk them through it and help them work on a plan so that they're resilient when something bad does happen."
— Lisa Plaggemier, executive director of the National Cybersecurity Alliance, on helping small businesses protect themselves from the growing risk of cyberattacks. A new Mastercard study shows that 46% of small businesses surveyed have experienced a cyberattack on their current business, and nearly one in five that suffered an attack then filed for bankruptcy or closed their business.
"We're putting ideas into action," said Jon Huntsman, Mastercard's vice chair and president, Strategic Growth. He interviewed Dina Powell McCormick, the vice chairman of BDT & MSD Partners and former U.S. deputy national security advisor, on the power of mentorship as well as James Mwangi, Group MD and CEO of Equity Group Holdings, on the digital finance revolution in Africa.
A conversation on rebuilding trust and designing a digital future rooted in agency, connection and shared purpose featured Kat Duffy, left, senior fellow for digital and cyberspace policy for CFR, Frank McCourt, center, executive chairman, McCourt Global, and founder, Project Liberty, and Eli Pariser, co-director of New_Public.
Summit co-host Andréa Vieira, left, founder and CEO of nailsaloon, spoke with Jenny Just, right, co-founder and managing partner of PEAK6 Investments, on how Just’s poker expertise lends itself to lessons in managing risk, making bold bets and playing the long game.
“We see so much of the internet's data. We're able to run it through our own machine learning systems, where our own AI tools are now identifying cybersecurity threats that no human had identified before, and that means that we're going to be able to stop the bad guys more effectively … At the end of the day, whoever has the most data wins in the age of AI, and the good guys have more data than the bad guys.”
— Matthew Prince, co-founder and chief executive officer, Cloudflare, on why he’s optimistic about AI’s power as a shield in cybersecurity.
"Guardrails and governance are seen as dirty words, but I truly believe that it is absolutely essential to make all the use cases you're talking about real. And so at the core of responsibility is trust. So when you think about all these amazing applications, whether it's in agriculture or whether it's in productivity, at the end of the day, we need to get to a place where not only humans can trust artificial intelligence, but with agentic AI, you can actually make sure that the AI agents are trusting other AI agents."
— Navrina Singh, CEO and founder of Credo AI, on building AI systems that are transparent, equitable and aligned with human values.
“One of the biggest problems with the circular economy is people assume it's about waste and trash, but actually it's about upstream design, and how do we build [that] into the design of our products and our systems and the ways we think and our mindsets? And this is where AI is actually really useful right now, to retrain our workforce. How do we think about the second and third and fourth life of a product when we're building it?”
— Danielle Holly, executive lead, North America, The Ellen MacArthur Foundation, on building long-term business value through regenerative practices. For more on the circular economy, read the Mastercard Economic Institute’s new report on how secondhand clothing is gaining market share.
“When you're looking at social media, it can be so intimidating, because now people are doing highly produced videos, and y'all, there's a filter for everything, right? And so I don't want people to be intimidated by that … I'd say, use what you got. I guarantee you there's something that you have that somebody else needs.”
— Pat Smith, CEO, Pat Smith Enterprises, on the rise of the creator economy and how it is democratizing influence.
“Good CEOs promote skepticism. They appreciate the people who challenge them, who ask hard questions, who you know don't necessarily agree with an idea and explain why they don't. Cynicism is corrosive. Cynicism is not that I disagree with what you're doing, but I don't trust your motives … Part of the way you build resilience is you earn trust, and you do it with authenticity.”
— Rich Lesser, global chair, Boston Consulting Group, on the evolution of leadership in a fast-changing world.
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