NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Wednesday, May 3, 2017

Swadhaar Saathi has been announced winner of the MetLife Foundation Inclusion Plus competition in India. The competition was open to entrepreneurs, businesses and non profit organisations and aimed to discover innovative solutions to promote financial capability and access to financial services in India. With more than 100 entries, Swadhaar Saathi won the grand prize with its money management application and collected a grant of 100,000 dollars.

The Swadhaar Group is creating its android-based illustrative money management tool to be used on low cost smartphones by sub-illiterate groups. The application will allow the users to enter their income and expenses and track their financials. Participants can set goals and save money. The app will be distributed through peer educators, who are women from the community and are graduates of the financial education program.

“Absolute excitement” is how Preeti Telang, CEO of Swadhaar FinAccess, described how it felt to win. Telang stated, “With this grant money, we will be able to accelerate what we planned to do in three years, in one year. This sets us on a trajectory to improve our app in three key ways: build new features to capture business data, create a hyper-local marketplace of financial inclusion tools, and add a suite of financial literacy content.”