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      Jayshree Venkatesan

      Jayshree Venkatesan

      Senior Vice President & Head of Partnership Development

      Accion

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      Jayshree Venkatesan is Senior Vice President and Head of Partnership Development at Accion, where she serves on the organization’s leadership team and leads its global partnership and resource mobilization strategy.

      Previously, as Vice President of Consumer Protection and Strategic Industry Engagement at Accion’s Center for Financial Inclusion, Jayshree led the development and execution of CFI’s consumer protection research and broader partnership strategy, contributing significantly to their global portfolio. She led two of the industry’s premier global convenings: Financial Inclusion Week, one of the largest virtual events dedicated to financial inclusion, bringing together more than 3,000 participants from over 140 countries in 2024, and the Responsible Finance Forum, which convenes leaders from financial institutions, technology companies, governments, investors, and development organizations alongside the G20 Global Partnership for Financial Inclusion to advance responsible finance and consumer protection.

      With more than 20 years of experience, Jayshree has built a career spanning investments, strategy, partnerships and public policy. Before joining Accion, she spent nearly a decade advising leading international organizations, including CGAP, the World Bank, JICA, and ITAD, on customer-centered financial services, digital innovation, and inclusive business models across emerging markets. Earlier in her career, Jayshree was a member of the founding leadership team at IFMR (now Dvara Trust), where she led the development of India’s first mezzanine investment fund for microfinance, pioneering an innovative financing structure that evolved into an alternative investment fund. She began her career at ICICI Bank.

      Beyond Accion, Jayshree contributes to the advancement of responsible finance and digital inclusion through several global advisory roles. She serves on the Consumers International Digital Finance Advisory Council, the Advisory Board for the GSMA Mobile Money Certification program, and the Advisory Council of the Pranava Institute’s Youth Digital Cultures Lab (YDCL), helping shape industry standards and emerging leadership in digital financial services. From 2021 to 2026, she served as Senior Policy Fellow at the Leir Institute at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, where she focused on expanding financial inclusion for migrants, refugees, and other vulnerable populations. She also served as an adjunct faculty member at the Fletcher School, teaching decision analysis for business.

      Jayshree is a recipient of the Chevening Fellowship for Leadership from the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, completed at King’s College, London. She earned an MA in International Relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, an MBA from the Management Development Institute in Gurgaon, and an undergraduate degree in Mathematics from Mumbai University.

      Speaking At

      • 1:00–2:30pmTue 17 NovPublic-Private RoundtableRoundtable Room 1Invite-OnlyModerator

        Sovereignty & Resilience

        Timebomb or Damp Squib? Building Trust by Addressing Errors, Frauds and Scams in DPI

        Public-Private RoundtableRoundtable Room 1Invite-OnlyModerator

        About this session

        Digital public infrastructure is scaling faster than the machinery meant to fix it when it fails. More than 36 countries have committed under the 50-in-5 campaign to design, implement and scale at least one DPI component by 2028, and in countries from Brazil to India, digital payments and digital ID already operate at population scale.

        Volume brings problems: more transactions mean more errors, and society-scale systems create new attack surfaces. Instant interoperable payments mean the money is transferred within seconds, but once it leaves an account and reaches another, there is little that can be done. Transfer of funds could take place to the wrong person, through a mistake in the phone number that acts as the alias, or done under duress. The Global Anti-Scam Alliance found in 2025 that 57% of adults worldwide had experienced a scam and 23% lost money as a result. Yet redress has not kept pace. Of a number of DPI grievance mechanisms assessed recently, a minority met a minimum "liveness" threshold — a published policy with acknowledgment and resolution timeframes, an escalation path, at least two working complaint channels, and basic case-capture capacity.

        That gap has consequences. Where liability for fraud is unassigned, harm falls between the cracks: the direct cause is an unknown malicious party, even though the system's speed and reach enabled the attack. And as DPIs start to link across borders, none of the existing mechanisms can follow a grievance from one jurisdiction to another.

        This roundtable will explore the state of play for trust in DPI solutions, as well as emergent potential solutions being deployed around the world, and what trust frameworks for DPI will look like in the coming years, including the approaches for creating interoperable grievance redressal frameworks.