See the Finalists of Fintech Innovation Challenge at MFWW 2019

For the first time in Asia, Women’s World Banking is hosting its agenda-setting Making Finance Work for Women Summit2019 on October 22-23 at Singapore’s Pan Pacific Hotel. During the summit, we are proud to present our inaugural FinTech Innovation Challenge!

Today, almost 1 billion women remain outside the formal financial system and that needs to change. Do you want to hear innovative solutions from FinTech startups around the world? The Making Finance Work for Women Summit will bring together our 4 finalists to present their solutions designed to support unbanked and underserved women’s economic security and prosperity. 
Who Will Win? Meet Our Finalists:

• Alfore (Colombia) brings financial products to the home of the underbanked in Latin America, a market of nearly 78 million people. Aflore distributes loans and insurance products through an innovative channel: a network of Informal Advisors that leverages technology and the trust existing in personal networks.
   
• Bloom Impact (Ghana) is a digital marketplace empowering small businesses to learn about and access credit and savings products through their mobile phone. Through their data-driven matching and scoring algorithms, Bloom Impact provides financial institutions with new, qualified customers, significantly reducing their customer acquisition costs, risks and turnaround times. Bloom Impact aims to democratize how unbanked and underserved micro and small businesses get financial services that best meet their needs. 
   
• Frontier Markets Consulting (India) is a last-mile distribution company with a mission to create ‘Saral Jeevan,’ or an ‘Easy Life,’ for rural customers by providing them with access to quality, high impact products and services in clean energy, water, productive appliances and finance through their network of digitized rural women entrepreneurs called Solar Sahelis though an e-commerce platform. Frontier Markets has enabled a hybrid model of women service providers, localized distribution and delivery, and a technology platform that tracks life-time value created for rural households. To date, 2500 rural women entrepreneurs have sold 700,000 solutions to 500,000 rural households impacting 3.5 million people. Solar Sahelis have earned over $2.5 MN in income, and facilitated over $1 MN in finance for rural communities.
   
• Pula (Kenya) provides accessible, scalable climate insurance solutions for smallholder farmers by bundling insurance with agricultural inputs like seed and fertilizer. Pula uses technology, like satellite imaging and yield data, to determine insurance payouts. It also collects and analyzes farmer data to give advice on good farming practices that increase yields and farm profits. Its mission is to improve agricultural productivity by reducing farming risk and providing agronomy advice to the underserved market of 1.5 billion smallholder farmers worldwide. Since 2014, it has facilitated index insurance coverage for over 1 million smallholder farmers across 11 countries in Africa and Asia.

The four finalists will receive 1-year membership into the Women’s World Banking Network of Partners, and the winner(s) will have the exciting opportunity to move on as finalist(s) to Monetary Authority of Singapore’s (MAS) Global FinTech Hackcelerator Demo Day at Singapore FinTech Festival (powered by KPMG Digital Village)