Tayo Akinyemi
April 30, 2007 — 01:13 am
Well it appears as if last week was “conference week” here at NextBillion, so it’s my turn to dish on my recent attendee experience. Ready? Here I go.
I was fortunate enough to attend 'Financial Inclusion, Innovation, and Investments,' a symposium organized by the Emerging Markets Program of the Department of Applied Economics and Management at Cornell University. In a happy bit of serendipity, a professor with whom I had corresponded informed me about the event just in time for me to change my itinerary. (I had planned to be in Ithaca the week before.)
Continue reading this article
Nitin Rao
April 19, 2007 — 09:05 am
I came across, by chance, what promises to be a very interesting venture.
A group of Indian youngsters are launching a social venture called The Spark Group. They have been educated at Ivy League universities such as MIT Sloan and Yale. Ayan Sarkar and Priya Naik - two of the founders - have worked with Nobel Laureate Prof. Muhammad Yunus in Dhaka.
Continue reading this article
Rob Katz
April 16, 2007 — 12:29 pm
Microcapital reports (via Auctionbytes) that eBay has moved into the peer-to-peer lending space with the purchase of MicroPlace. This is significant because eBay is far from the first to enter this space - which is currently dominated by Kiva, Zopa, and Prosper.
How will a big company like eBay succeed in the nascent world of P2P lending? Will this affect the way Kiva or Propser works? More on the acquisition, from Microcapital:
MicroPlace will soon launch an eBay style online marketplace where individuals will be able to make microfinance investments, most likely in the form of notes offered by microbanks. The transaction will be hosted by eBay working through an intermediary like the US Calvert Foundation in order for such investments to clear regulatory hurdles. It will be in the same vein as current sites such as prosper.com (for-profit), where individuals list and bid on loans within the US market, and Kiva.org (non-profit) where individuals can lend to specific micro-businesses in the developing world through links with microfinance institution (MFI) partners.
Continue reading this article
