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

Thursday, June 4, 2015

We’ve been keeping an eye on the Center for Financial Services Innovation, which is backing new ways to promote the financial health of Americans—especially the “underbanked and the underserved, traditionally an overlooked segment of the financial services market.”

A key premise of CFSI’s work is that companies can profitably serve the poor with low-cost financial service products—and help put the bottom-feeding predatory lending industry out of business.

Financial inclusion is a super hot funding area right now, even more so globally than in the United States, as we report often, and lots of funders working on economic security issues are interested in CFSI, as are financial institutions. We wrote back in March about JP Morgan Chase’s collaboration with CFSI and its powerful new advisory council including Darren Walker, Ben Jealous, and other heavy hitters in the assets and financial inclusion arena.

JPMorgan Chase is the founding partner with CFSI of the Financial Solutions Lab, a $30 million, five-year initiative “to identify, test, and expand the availability of promising innovations that help Americans increase savings, improve credit, and build assets.”

Recently, we got a better taste of the ideas this effort is getting behind, when it selected the finalists for a competition who’ll share $3 million.