A couple weeks ago, at the Underbanked Financial Services Forum, we asked people for big, wild ideas for serving the underbanked: our portfolio companies showed their strength to standing-room-only crowds, four companies battled in the Core Challenge, a modest group of Tweeters threw caution to the wind, and the largest…
Compass Principles: Moving in the Right Direction
My partner in crime, Jennifer Tescher, who runs the Center for Financial Services Innovation, is leading a bold movement to increase quality in consumer finance. High time! Here’s what she has to say: Given the high level of consumer confusion and distrust, the Center for Financial Services Innovation (CFSI) set out in…
Mobile: take these broken wings and learn to fly!
Other than the fact that we’re soon going to start dropping like flies from cancer of the ear, mobile devices do promise a revolution even greater than the internet. In fact, mobile is becoming the internet. Especially lower income people are, and will increasingly rely on their mobile phones to…
2012 Underbanked Innovators Challenge Finalists
We received many nominations for the best innovation serving the underbanked in America. Mostly startups, but also some big companies, including banks. Mostly payments, but also credit, savings and financial capability solutions. Mostly true innovations, but also quite a few doozies. Our judges looked for true innovation, demo-ability, and also…
Impact Advantage: Our view on impact investing and the double bottom line
We are a double bottom line fund. This means that we target excellent financial returns (first bottom line) and measurable positive social impact (second bottom line). When most people learn this, they assume we are a no-bottom line fund. I’d like to explain why this is an entirely reasonable misperception,…
Effing the Ineffable: Nike Fuel for Finance
Everyone agrees we need better (financial) health. We also agree that those who are less (financially) healthy need to make bigger behavior changes. This is hard stuff. It’s also where most of the (financial) industry says they can only do so much. As a culture, we have a lot more…
Will the Underserved lead Mobile Wallet Adoption?
Core’s Summer Associate, Aaron Mercurio, got started before the summer and is more bullish on the mobile wallet than I am: The hype around the future of mobile payments and related services (e.g., real-time offers, P2P fund transfer, increased ‘one-to-one’ advertising) is focused on reaching the tech-savvy smartphone-carrying consumer. The…
Crowd source payday lending, a la Barclaycard Ring
Yesterday, my CFSI colleague, David Newville, was trying to persuade me that the payday industry should do what Barclay’s new credit card, Barclaycard Ring, intends to do: offer its customers total transparency into the costs, profits and losses of its business and the opportunity to build the product themselves. Crowd sourced lending!…
Are you up to the Core Challenge?
We want to shine a spotlight on the most innovative teams serving the underbanked. You could be an app developer in a dorm-room in Beloit, WI or work for one of the largest financial technology companies on earth. If you have built a product or service that works (or will…
Give Credit Where Building it is Overdue
Suze Orman, Credit Karma and others are breathing new life into the important effort of helping people see, track and improve their credit score. My friends at CFSI and at PERC have long been active in trying to expand the dataset used to build ones credit report. The idea was,…