Women’s long-term investing could power a Rs 40 lakh crore GDP opportunity: Lxme-EY Report

Financial access for women has grown rapidly, but long-term wealth creation has not. This remains riddled with structural constraints, reveals a report by Lxme, a financial platform for women, in collaboration with EY India. 

India has witnessed one of the fastest expansions in financial inclusion globally, with over 89% of women now holding bank accounts, and digital payments becoming embedded in everyday transactions. 

Yet there is a critical paradox, the report highlights: access has not translated into agency, and participation has not translated into wealth.

The report titled ‘Unlocking Her Wealth: The Untapped Economy – Redesigning Financial Systems for Women from Inclusion Metrics to Ownership Outcomes’ introduces for the first time a ‘Women’s Financial Prosperity Index’.

The index captures a holistic view of a woman’s financial life and includes parameters such as her access to bank accounts and digital payments, her use of formal products, her control over her own account, and her retirement readiness.

The index scores Indian women's financial prosperity at 28.1 out of 100, indicating significant headroom for growth. 

Drawing on national datasets (both urban and rural), global benchmarks, an EY survey of 1,033 respondents, and Lxme’s proprietary platform data from over 1 million users, the report outlines the structural barriers limiting women’s financial outcomes. 

They are:

●   Women earn Rs 73 for every Rs 100 earned by men, with over 60% employed in informal sectors with volatile incomes.

●   Only 41.7% of working-age women participate in the labour force, compared to 78.8% of men.

●   Just 8.6% of women invest in mutual funds or equities, versus 22.3% of men.

●   Only 14.2% of women hold pensions or provident fund accounts, compared to 32.8% of men.

●   Women account for just 25% of mutual fund folios and typically begin investing five years later than men, with nearly half the average first investment size.

●   Indian women hold only 60% of men’s retirement wealth.

●   Only 21% of Indian women are financially literate.

The Lxme–EY report estimates that enabling women’s participation in long-term financial investments could unlock a cumulative GDP-equivalent opportunity of Rs 40 lakh crore. This refers to the potential GDP that could be unlocked if women's participation in long-term financial investments were to increase, and if all individuals had equal access to education, jobs, and investment, regardless of gender, race, or background.

This represents incremental national growth driven by deeper capital market participation, stronger domestic savings, and sustained long-term investment.

“When women’s savings move into formal, productive instruments, it strengthens India’s domestic capital base,” says Priti Rathi Gupta, Founder, Lxme. 

She continues, “Second, when women control financial resources, families prioritise nutrition, healthcare, and education differently. These determine the quality of India’s future workforce.  Third, the informal economy begins to formalise… leading to  job creation.” 

On the sidelines of the report's launch, Gupta breaks down the numbers and highlights how long-term participation by women will help India’s growth story.

Edited excerpts: 

HerStory (HS): India has achieved near-universal access to bank accounts for women. Yet your report argues that access hasn’t translated into ownership. Where exactly is the system breaking down?

Priti Rathi Gupta (PRG): When I look at the data, the number that stops me is this: 89% of Indian women now have bank accounts. 56% of all Jan Dhan accounts are held by women; that’s 29 crore women in the system. Zero-balance accounts have even fallen to just 8.4%, down from 20% in 2018. So on paper, the numbers look great. But when you look at what those accounts are actually being used for, the picture changes completely.

Most of these accounts function primarily as conduits for government transfers and cash withdrawals. They are not being used to save, invest, or build anything. And that's the breakdown. Access was the door. But we never built the staircase inside.

Our report introduces the Lxme–EY Women's Financial Prosperity Index, which scores India at just 28.1 out of 100 across the full journey from access to durable wealth. That means more than two-thirds of that journey is still structurally blocked for women.

The system is breaking down at agency at the point where a woman needs to decide, act, and sustain. And that's not her failure. It's a design failure. The system was never built for her.

HS: You call women’s wealth ‘economic infrastructure’. What would change if policymakers truly treated it that way?

PRG: Everything. And I mean that literally.

Right now, women’s financial inclusion is treated as an important welfare objective, but peripheral. A box to tick. But our report estimates a cumulative GDP-equivalent impact of Rs 40 lakh crore if women’s participation in long-term financial investments increases meaningfully. That is not a welfare number. That is an infrastructure number.

If policymakers truly treated women's wealth as infrastructure, three things would change immediately. First, financial capability would be embedded in school curricula rather than left to occasional literacy drives. Second, pension and insurance systems would be redesigned to accommodate flexible, stop-start contributions because women’s incomes are not linear, and the system should not penalise that. And third, we would start measuring ownership, not just access. We measure access very well in India. We almost never measure who actually owns assets.

When you build a road, you don’t just measure whether the road exists. You measure whether people can travel on it. We need to apply the same logic to women’s financial journeys.

HS: What surprised you the most in the data? Was it income patterns, risk behaviour, or institutional design?

PRG: The retirement wealth gap surprised me the most because it is the most invisible.

We know women earn less. We know they invest less. But when you see that women in India hold 40% less retirement wealth than men and that even globally, in far more equal economies, women still hold 26% less, you realise this is not an Indian problem. It's a global structural problem.

And what drives it is not just income. It is the compounding of many small disadvantages over time. Women enter the market five years later than men, at 35 versus 30. Their first investment is nearly half the size, Rs 6,500, versus Rs 12,000. They are over-indexed in gold and fixed deposits and under-indexed in equities. Each of these individually looks manageable. Together, over a lifetime, they create a retirement crisis in slow motion.

That was the finding that made me feel the urgency most acutely.

HS: You argue that friction and fear are deliberately reduced on LXME. What are the top three frictions women face in investing?

PRG: The first is the fear of making a mistake. Women, particularly first-time investors, carry a disproportionate sense of responsibility around financial decisions. If they get it wrong, they feel the consequences fall on the whole family. So they wait until they feel fully ready. And fully ready never comes.

On Lxme, we saw that 59% of women made their first investment only after at least one month of observing, learning, and building comfort. We designed for that. Small starts, no pressure, no minimum that feels intimidating. And once they did invest, their average first investment amount doubled within just six weeks compared to the industry benchmark.

The second friction is fragmentation. Women learn in one place, save in another, and, if at all, insure through an entirely separate channel. There is no single continuous journey. And without continuity, confidence doesn't build.

The third, and most underrated, is the absence of community. Traditional financial systems leave women to figure things out on their own. But women consistently gravitate towards peer networks and self-help groups precisely because social proof substitutes for institutional trust. When we introduced community-led learning on Lxme, conversion from literacy to investment increased fivefold. Five times. That’s not a feature. That’s a fundamental design principle.

HS:  If women are more disciplined savers, why does that discipline not translate into higher wealth accumulation?

PRG: This is such an important question because the discipline is real. Women save consistently. They manage household budgets with extraordinary precision. But discipline alone doesn’t build wealth. Direction does.

The problem is where the discipline is directed. Women are over-indexed toward safe, familiar, low-yield instruments. 32.6% save through physical gold. 18.7% through cash, chit funds, and self-help groups. Only 8.6% invest in mutual funds or equities.

Now, bank deposits and small savings instruments yield 1 to 2% annually after inflation. Diversified equity investments deliver 8 to 9% real returns. Over a working lifetime of 25 to 30 years, that difference is not incremental. It is the difference between a safety net and a wealth base.

Women's discipline is an extraordinary asset. The financial system just hasn't given it the right instruments to work with. When it does, as the Lxme data shows, women become persistent, long-horizon investors who consistently outperform expectations.

HS: If women’s participation in long-term investing increases significantly, what macroeconomic shift could India see in the next decade?

PRG: The Lxme-EY report estimates a cumulative GDP-equivalent impact of Rs 40 lakh crore over a decade if women’s participation in long-term financial investments increases meaningfully. But I want to go beyond the headline number because the real story is in the channels through which that impact flows.

First, capital markets deepen. A significant portion of women’s savings currently sits in gold, cash, and informal schemes. When that moves into formal, productive instruments, mutual funds, equities, and pensions, it doesn’t just benefit individual women. It strengthens India's domestic capital base and reduces dependence on foreign institutional flows.

Second, household resilience increases. When women control financial resources, families prioritise nutrition, healthcare, and education differently. These are not soft outcomes; they determine the quality of India's future workforce. Women's wealth is, in a very direct sense, an investment in human capital.

Third, the informal economy begins to formalise. When women entrepreneurs have access to savings, credit, and insurance in their own names, their micro and small businesses scale. A tailoring unit becomes a workshop. A home kitchen becomes a catering brand. That is broad-based job creation, the kind that no single policy can manufacture.

India's gross savings rate is already above 30% of national income. The question is not whether Indians save; they do. The question is whether those savings become investments. Women are the answer to that question. When their wealth is taken seriously, the entire economy grows faster, more inclusively, and more durably.

That is what Rs 40 lakh crore actually means.

(The story has been updated to change Priti Rathi Gupta's designation to founder.)