Pablo Freund

Pablo Freund is a Senior Advisor with the Criterion Institute, a non profit think tank that works with social change makers to demystify finance and broaden their perspective on how to engage with and shift financial systems. He is an experienced financial services professional focusing on women’s financial inclusion and the development of gender lens financial services. He is the founder of Bare Maximum, a boutique advisory firm helping international financial institutions, nonprofits, and start-ups advance the emergence of an equitable, ethical, and sustainable global economy. He is also the co-founder of Be Girl, a social enterprise focused on making high-performance menstrual hygiene products radically accessible for women and girls globally. 

Pablo is the Gender Financial Inclusion technical expert for Inter-American Development Bank’s technical assistance program supporting Public National Development Banks’ effort to collect and report sex-disaggregated data and the UN Foundation’s Data2x Women’s Financial Inclusion Partnership, leading their sex-disaggregated data harmonization efforts. He also serves as the Financial Alliance for Women’s data science lead, managing the largest global private sector gender lens supply-side sex-disaggregated financial services survey for the publication of the annual “Economics of Banking on Women” report.

In addition to Pablo’s work in the financial inclusion space, he has extensive experience at the intersection of gender and energy access. Over the past several years, he has worked with organizations on the development of gender mainstreaming policies to increase women’s participation in the energy sector as well as access to electricity programs across Sub-Saharan Africa. 

He started his career in financial services with UBS in New York, prior to which he received Bachelor of Arts degrees in Economics and History of Art and Architecture from Brown University, and a Master of Science in Sustainability Management from Columbia University’s Earth Institute.