Posts Tagged ‘Crowdfunding’

Weekly Microfinance News & Announcements 4/6/2012

posted: 2012-04-06 @ 5:31 pm EDT

Starbucks ‘Google Offers’ Deal: Half Price Gift Cards Will Benefit ‘Create Jobs For USA’ Fund

By Huffington Post Money Google Offers will sell $10 Starbucks gift cards for the price of $5 on Wednesday in a deal available only to those who have subscribed to Google’s Groupon-like deals site that went live in Portland last April and has since expanded to more than 40 cities.

Jobs Act: A great start, but more is needed

By Duncan L. Niederauer, CNN Money New legislation giving small businesses access to capital will help, but it won’t solve the jobs crisis. America’s corporate leaders need to join together to fuel the growth of entrepreneurial innovation.

Financial Literacy Survey Exposes Significant Gaps in Grasp of Personal Finance Skills

By PR Web In recognition of Financial Literacy Month, the National Foundation for Credit Counseling (NFCC) and the Network Branded Prepaid Card Association (NBPCA) today released the results of the 2012 Financial Literacy Survey. In its sixth year, the survey annually provides data and trending around Americans’ attitudes and behaviors related to personal finance.

Government rules out role for Yunus in Grameen Bank chief’s selection

By Mizan Rahman, Gulf Times The government yesterday ruled out the possibility of selecting Nobel laureate Mohammad Yunus as the head of a search committee to select the new managing director for Grameen Bank he had founded.

The ripple effect: Supporting a local business lender supports your local economy

By Dennis Hunter, The Times-Standard In a community, money that is invested within creates a ripple effect that can be passed on and multiplied outward to broaden its impact on the community as a whole. In business, you need to understand how the ripple effect can affect your business and how the actions you take affect the businesses and people connected to your company.

Funding Circle, a Kickstarter for SMBs, Picks Up $16M From Index, Union Square Ventures

By Ingrid Lunden, TechCrunch Some great news for small business owners, and perhaps a sign of more crowdsourced funding coming to the U.S.: the UK-based Funding Circle— a kind of Kickstarter for lending to smaller enterprises — has just announced that it has raised a $16 million round to further build up its business of enabling non-bank lending to small enterprises.

Weekly Microfinance News & Announcements 2/3/2012

posted: 2012-02-03 @ 6:00 am EST

Think Again: Microfinance

By David Roodman, Foreign Policy What has made so many so sure of microcredit? The ideas are powerful: a blend of self-reliance and liberation that appeals across the political spectrum.

How “the crisis” changed microfinance and where we go from here…

By Sam Mendelson, Microfinance Focus A little over a year ago, this industry of ours was shaken to its core. It wasn’t so much the events in Andhra Pradesh (AP) per se – distressing as some stories of client mistreatment were.

Revive Made in USA? Easier said than done

By Parija Kavilanz, CNN “We didn’t pay that with a small business loan,” she said. “That came from our savings.” Still, she’s not bitter. Her factory has created 50 new jobs in the area. And she hopes to grow that to 100 this year. “We’re trying to do the right thing and …

The true costs of prepaid debit cards

By Felix Salmon, Reuters Blogs (blog) By Felix Salmon Anisha Sekar of Nerdwallet has officially launched a comparison tool which allows you to work out which prepaid debit card might be best for you — and, crucially, allows you to compare the cost of a prepaid debit card to the cost of a …

900+ Have Already Signed WeFunder Petition Demanding Crowdfunding of Startups

By Walter Frick, BostInno While “crowdfunding” has been a success in charitable contexts with sites like Kiva and Kickstarter, as the law currently stands startups are able to take money only from accredited investors, and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) limits the …

What Will It Take To Save the Unbanked?

By Justine Rivero , Forbes Controversy surrounding celebrity-endorsed prepaid cards threw around words like “unbanked” and “underbanked.” But the real head-scratcher isn’t the high-fee cards and their Hollywood affiliations, but why it’s taken so long to recognize the plight of …

Big Banks’ Small Business Lending: Do The Numbers Really Add Up?

By Janean Chun, The Huffington Post News Editors But Kassar has crunched the data the four banks reported for the quarterly FDIC call reports and found that these banks did not show increases in outstanding small-business loan balances from the end of 2010 to the third quarter of 2011.

How Nonprofits And Commercial Groups Can Help The Economy

By Lewis Humphries, San Francisco Chronicle As if to prove how valuable and effective these unions can be, the Create Jobs for USA campaign enjoyed instant success in gaining funds to both create and …

A New Era Under The Volcker Rule

By Matt Atkins, Financier Worldwide Due for implementation in July 2012, the Volcker Rule, part the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act, aims to reduce the scope for banks to make risky investments with their own capital. Current proposals will ban banks from making trades from their own …

Weekly Microfinance News & Announcements 12/9/11

posted: 2011-12-09 @ 2:09 pm EST

Occupy Big Business: The Sharing Economy’s Quiet Revolution

By Sara Horowitz, The Atlantic These and other “collective consumption” companies are part of the new economy arising out of necessity, as traditional businesses and government are increasingly unable to meet Americans’ needs and provide basic supports.

The MicroPlace Ambition: Unleashing $35 Billion in Financial Services Funding …

By Rahim Kanani, Forbes In an interview with Ashwini Narayanan, General Manager of MicroPlace, we discussed the origin and evolution of the company, the nature of social impact investing and microfinance, organizational milestones of recent past, and how to convince the average investor of the enormous potential of impact investing…

Chicago putting $1 million into microloans to spur small businesses

by John Byrne, Chicago Tribune He got the funds from Accion Chicago, a nonprofit that grants small loans to people who don’t qualify to get them from banks. “Without that, we wouldn’t …

Why Start-Ups Need ‘Crowd-Funding’

by Tom Szaky, New York Times (blog) It has been used, variously, to raise seed financing for socially responsible start-ups (Launcht), to supply microcredit in the developing world (Kiva), to collect donations (Karma411), to collect campaign contributions (the 2008 Obama campaign) and to …

Global Microcredit Summit 2011 Report

by Microfinance Focus Insisting that his work with social business is not a move away from microcredit, but that microcredit is in fact a social business, he argued for business-oriented solutions to social problems, drawing on many experiences as MD of Grameen Bank. …

Supporting Small Business in a Big Way

by Erin Eggers, San Antonio Express As 2011 comes to a close, the founder of San Antonio-based Acción Texas has much to celebrate about the past year. Janie Barrera and the organization she …

Weekly Microfinance News & Announcements 10/28/11

posted: 2011-10-28 @ 1:10 pm EDT

Unbanked America

By Catherine Rampell, New York Times As the Pew study cites, the 2009 FDIC National Survey of Unbanked and Underbanked Households found that 31 percent of households that dropped a bank account

Crowdfunding draws interest from entrepreneurs

by Steven Overly, Washington Post The concept is not dissimilar from microfinance organizations, such as Kiva or MicroPlace, that dispatch small, crowdfunded loans to screened small-business owners around the world. Some even allow financiers to accrue interest.

Urban microfinance clients move out of poverty faster than rural

by Microfinance Focus These are the findings from a report released by Grameen Foundation that analyses the data collected by Grameen Koota using Progress out of Poverty Index (PPI). Grameen Koota (GK) has analyzed the data for more than 48000 clients who have at least two ..

Sam Adams Helps Finance Small Companies « CBS Boston

CBS Boston O’Garro turned to Samuel Adams Brewing the American Dream, a microlending program funded by Boston Beer Co. and run by ACCION USA, a Boston-based

ACCION launches Delta lending operation | Arkansas News …

Arkansas News ACCION Delta, as it will be called, strictly non-stop for business Wednesday morning. The association specializes in lending indispensable collateral and