A newly established collaboration between FINCA International and USAID’s Partnering to Accelerate Entrepreneurship (PACE) Initiative launched the new platform FINCA Forward. It focuses on innovation and facilitates collaboration between microfinance institutions that support the poor and early-stage fintech enterprises. This allows FINCA International to embrace and fuel the role of growing fintech businesses play in building jobs and driving growth.
FINCA Forward is currently slated as a two-year-pilot thanks to a grant from USAID, through Feed the Future and the PACE Initiative. Both FINCA International and USAID PACE have common interests in the platform, which solves the pioneer gap for growing and small businesses. It also brings lessons in innovation and partnership to the social enterprise and development industry, while unlocking innovation potential within socially-responsible microfinance institutions.
“By catalyzing support and investment for early-stage fintech enterprises, we aim to help small and growing businesses overcome the pioneer gap and to enable microfinance institutions to bring much-needed financial services to at-risk populations of women, youth and the rural poor,” said FINCA International CEO and President, Rupert Scofield.
Because women are primarily impacted by this lack of access to financial services, the FINCA Forward program includes a lens to focus on considerations for female-led and owned enterprises in its selection criteria, as well as services and products focused specifically on female microfinance clients.
No matter where they are in the world, the program assists fintech enterprises in attracting growth capital, developing their technical capacity, and lays groundwork for microfinance institutions to provide financial services to the bottom of the pyramid.
