Much of the world's workforce earns outside formal payroll systems. Income can arrive daily, seasonally or irregularly, while many savings, credit, pension and insurance products still assume a stable monthly salary. Informal workers are therefore not a marginal customer segment; in many emerging markets they are the economy's centre of gravity. Digital payments and alternative data have made it possible to build financial histories for people previously invisible to formal institutions, but access alone does not guarantee trust or sustained use. The roundtable compares products and distribution models designed around irregular income and asks what makes an informal worker continue using a formal financial product after the first transaction.

Many promising financial companies do not fail because the product is weak. They fail between early proof and meaningful scale. Growth capital becomes harder to secure, institutional partners hesitate to integrate with younger firms, and entering each new market can require rebuilding relationships, compliance processes and distribution from scratch. This roundtable focuses on that scale gap. It asks which forms of capital are missing after the early stages, what would make banks and other large institutions more willing to partner with growth-stage providers, and which shared infrastructure or market-access mechanisms could reduce the cost of expanding across emerging markets.