November 11, 2016

Accion raises awareness of financial inclusion at Do It Day

Written by Lisa Lacy

This post originally appeared on The Drum.

At The Drum’s Do It Day in New York, Accion, a nonprofit that seeks to expand access to financial services around the world, worked with teams from digital agencies Rapp and Syzygy on its challenge to raise awareness of financial inclusion, or addressing the needs of the 3 billion people worldwide who are underserved by mainstream financial services.

The goal was to come up with a plan to engage more of its corporate partners, which include the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Citi, Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank – and enable any partner staff, particularly those with expertise in financial services technologies, or fintech, to support Accion’s work. That was according to Katie Mounts, director of engagement at Accion.

“Accion has strong relationships with a number of corporate partners whose support has made much of our work possible. We’ve had requests from staff at a number of those partners for opportunities to share their skillsets directly with Accion to support our work,” Mounts said. “At Do It Day, we’re exploring opportunities to develop an engagement program where partner staff with expertise in fintech and financial inclusion can join our team for a short period to advance our shared efforts to expand access to quality financial services around the world.”

Per Mounts, the organization provides microfinance services, as well as investing initiatives, client education and industry training.

“What our organization does is take a multi-pronged approach to solving that problem [of financial inclusion],” Mounts said. “We work with microfinance solutions [providers] and also do a lot of work in the fintech space and work with partners to come up with innovative ways to use digital technology to expand access to financial services.”

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