I write from, time to time, about financing, strategy, impact startup and entreprenurial experiences, financial inclusion and sustainability. While I have professionally been financing impactful projects, my personal focus in sustainability started with financial inclusion, moving onto care and most recently, greentech.
-
SME Lending Fintech-Style – Part 2: Financing Context
To unlock small and midsize enterprise (SME) lending requires addressing a complex problem with multiple parts. Alternative financing is part of the solution, but so is improving cost-efficiency of bank lending. With funding gaps in the billions, all financing channels will need to be made more productive and will require improvements to the way SMEs…
-
SME Lending Fintech-Style – Part 1: Ecosystem
Financial institutions are staffed by experienced, well-educated, highly paid individuals. Do they need to partner with financial technology (fintech) firms or bring in consultants– surely they can throw money at any problem? Perhaps. But as 19th and 20th century economic examples of Comparative Advantage teaches us, combining powerful with nimble can offer positive outcomes. Banks…
-
Banks finally readying to crash the fintech party?
There’s no shortage of opinions on how the banking industry will be reshaped. Quite popular, are predictions of banks relegated to boring (regulated) infrastructure & verification services, augmented by a multitude of slick UX, machine-learned fintech players delighting impatient, ‘fed-up-with-the mediocre’ consumers. In a previous post asking how we want to ‘Uberize’ (disrupt) banking, I…
-
Do we really want banking ‘Uberized’? Part 2
Banking and corporate leaders and middle management seem to have been passively observing but not proactively responding to the VC and angel funded onslaught of web and mobile-driven ‘apps’ and marketplaces. Part 1 of this post sought to define what we mean by Uberization and touched on the elements of disruption of the Taxi and…
-
Do we really want banking ‘Uberized’? Part 1
Do we want to ‘Uberize’ banking to improve it, in the same way as taxis and hotels? Even for those working within the tech ecosystem, it’s hard to keep pace with the impact digitization and software continues to have on processes and competitive balance across industries. Venture capital seems to love talk about disrupting fragmented…
-
Rebalancing the financial services workforce
It’s been an interesting start to the year. Falling oil prices, stock market dampening and China-led slowdown have kept us occupied while snowstorms, rains and floods do their thing. On the international stage, a few key themes seem to have been dominating Davos: while the year’s burning security, humanitarian and energy and political realities are…
-
India’s digital banking opportunities–part 2
In the first part of this post, I summarised and linked to some of the recent changes to the Indian banking landscape and the move towards wider financial inclusion. Payment banks and small bank licences issued by the Reserve Bank of India. While shifting the status quo, the central bank has relaxed some regulatory requirements.…
-
India’s banking opportunities–part 1
India seems to be leading the charge in financial inclusion today. With one of the world’s largest populations (banked and banked), the central bank needs to move fast and decisively. And is doing so by creating its banking big bang. The government started with the creation of biometric ID cards. The central bank (RBI) has…