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.
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How do we fill 60 million empty bank accounts?
Last year the Indian government embarked on a financial inclusion drive of massive proportion. The fruit of this labour: 160+ million bank accounts for the underserved. Wow. The government’s identity card scheme (that made this achievable) notwithstanding, still a substantive achievement. But with all the best intentions, these accounts are not yet doing what…
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Is regulation contributing to ‘disrupted’ financial services?
I tend to get more passionate about this idea as the evening progresses. A few years ago, a trickle of fintech startups started offering alternatives to traditional financial services. Lending, payments, FX, savings, borrowing, wealth management were among the first targets, all of whom expanded the trickle to a flood. Narrowing it down to lending,…
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Are startup versatility and pivoting a good thing? – Part 3
In part 2 of this post, I was faced with a difficult choice in 2013: change direction and focus of the current startup, or start fresh. Starting fresh meant admitting failure, and in some ways, giving up. And I don’t like giving up! In my mind, by keeping it going I was fanning the embers…
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Are startup versatility and pivoting a good thing? – Part 2
In part 1 of this post, I talked about pivoting, using my own fintech startup as an example. Setting out to boil the ocean of small business lending, we’d built a working capital platform that combined a borrower/lender marketplace; invoicing; and basic collections CRM. Market timing, borrower behaviour, public policy all shaped the months that…
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Are startup versatility and pivoting a good thing? – Part 1
Product (or business) life extension is a boon when you learn marketing and strategy in business school. But for an undercapitalized startup without a full time marketing brain, it can just prolong the pain. You can’t fail fast if you are continually creating new use cases and finding new doors to knock on! Waiting seems…
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Team Is Hard!
Business model, product, market, timing: all key success factors for any startup (and pretty much any organization! But team, is an ever-evolving puzzle that changes shape over time. Pitching to investors or accelerators? What’s on paper grabs their attention: technical cofounder, tick. Digital marketing, tick. Worked in a startup before, tick. Domain knowledge, tick. With…
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Failing fast isn’t always easy for startups when tackling complexity or inertia
“Gain traction fast, or fail fast and move on”. All start-ups hear this. The logic behind this is sound: if enough users attach to a product, the need must be strong enough to back. Then, it becomes a race hinged on marketing and viable customer acquisition. Create website, build prototype, beta and MVP. Get early…
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Why are business payments in the US still analog?
NACHA in the US recently approved same day ACH, something consumers and businesses in the UK take for granted. There is plenty if activity in person to person payments, mobile wallets etc. We can save the last 10 feet of effort to buy a coffee, or having to even dig into our wallets for a…