 So thanks to you stayed the course as you just heard with the final session tonight And we do appreciate that we are stood between you and cocktails. So But I know it's going to be really interesting, you know, this plenary session is about sort of Really, how do we scale up impact? And I really feel like Kiva is the poster child of that And so I'm thrilled to be sat here with CEO of Kiva Neville Crawley From San Francisco himself and as is Kiva and so Those of you who aren't familiar with Kiva and it was set up in 2005 It's a crowdfunding platform that moves finance towards microloans for individuals entrepreneurs, you know including refugees small holders And women many of the you know the themes have been talking about here at Socap and chiefly in developing Countries where interest rates are really crippling otherwise And it's moved one point four billion dollars in capital over that period Which is just incredible and one billion of that has been to women. So already such an incredible impact has been made Which you think might be enough except Neville was brought on two years ago chiefly with the mandate to take that impact even further And during these two years He has done just that to you know What has sort of resulted in a systems change? Which really is the sort of fullest expression of impact there is and I think it's something as an impact investment community that we shy Away from talking about like how do we get to system change? And I know the panel panelists before us have talked a little bit about that And so I think sort of you know to start with and it would be helpful And some of you may be sort of starting out yourselves of sort of examining how you could have more impact to hear from Neville about who had a very different background to a non-profit before he joined Kiva about what he saw in Kiva And what you saw in Kiva that gave you the confidence that Impact could really be scaled up Thank you so much and rarely am I called a poster chart or some excited We sit here as a poster child and so Yeah, I said I joined Kiva a couple of years ago and I've done various things in finance and technology Always in the private sector and directly before Kiva I was building quantitative trading algorithms a hedge fund So I couldn't be couldn't be further away and and I met I met the board chair of Kiva And you know, I knew the brand I was always very impressed by the brand but over over this lunch I I understood the I understood really the first time or a couple of billion people in the world Who don't have access to finance. There are billion people who don't even have identity and They're they're paying 30 50 in some cases a hundred percent interest rates Meanwhile Kiva has the Kiva data is that our loss rate is two to three percent to the same population So I'm like wait trillions of dollars needs to move to these folks who have a better repayment rate than US credit card And there's like a 50% plus spread Meanwhile, I'm raiding like the most complex algorithms ever to make one basis point like there's something fundamentally wrong about this and And I just couldn't get that thought thought out of my minds that from a that this is like a solvable problem You know what I mean? There are problems that are not solvable But like big asset classes with really big interest spreads in general That's a solvable problem. And so I just couldn't figure out like why is the system like this? It shouldn't be like this So You solved it So you move to what's effectively known as the link internally Kiva 2.0 and And over the last two years, it's been sort of kind of full steam ahead You've got Kiva capital and Kiva protocol now so maybe you can just talk us through how that journey began some just and You know sort of highlights some of the major changes around impacts that have happened in that short period Oh, yeah, so so I joined I joined Kiva CEO and Immediately instead of running the Organization I just went off and went to visit our borrower's and visit our financial partners for several months Which I'm sure was quite distressing for the board of directors there and possibly for employees too But but I really didn't know the answer to the problem So I just wanted to go sit with people sit with people earning a few dollars a day sit with the financial institutions are serving them and and try to understand and I really I really learned three things which has become the portfolio of things We're doing at Kiva right now one is that the crowdfunding dollars. Yeah, we deploy. We've deployed $1.4 billion over time. We deploy about 150 million dollars a year But we could we could 10x that and there's market demand for it and the reason that there's market demand is we're providing Zero or very close to zero percent capital where the crowd will absorb the loss So we can go to MFI or social enterprise and say hey you serve this market segment We think there's this other service market segment and we'll provide The cheapest most risk tolerant capital in the world for you to explore that segment And so we've catalyzed refugee lending for lenders who haven't lent there before we've lent to border regions All of this kind of the edge of impact staff that we can do because of the unique nature of the capital So that kind of was very clear if we can get as much money out as we can kind of get our hands on Then the problem comes about money in and so we're building new mobile apps We're making a bunch of changes to the site. So we really just it's kind of a quite straightforward Let's make it a attractive consumer internet proposition that people want to come to so that's one second questions are sitting with the financial institutions and social enterprises real simple questions like like we provide capital like this You've done these refugee loans if I could give you you know five million bucks at some reasonable interest rate to scale that up Are you interested and and every single financial institution that I spoke with and social enterprise said Yeah, we would love to take price capital from Kiva to scale up the impact And so from that cave came this idea of Kiva capital We're launching our first fund in the coming months, which will be a refugee focused fund and the the basis behind that fund Is that we proved we're 15 million dollars of crowdfunding platforms that in the markets We operate and we operate in 90 countries in the world the refugees have basically the exact same repayment rate as regular population And yet they get a fraction of the dollars. So it's just a fundamental market and efficiency that we were able to prove with data Is incorrect. It's actually a market and efficiency. And so now we're raising wholesale funding from institutional Sources to go scale up where we've proven that the money is going to get repaid and we expect to do a series of thematic funds around Women's empowerment ag like a whole bunch of impact areas, but the interesting thing for Kiva is because we have a part we've worked with 500 Financial institutions around the world that we have a network so we can slice and dice impact in a very bespoke way And we can deploy capital in places. We have a track record and we know them Well, so I think we have the opportunity to scale up to be a substantial Impact first asset manager there over time. And then the third thing that maybe we'll get on to a bit more is actually a Even if we deploy several billion dollars like this over the coming years, it doesn't change the system, right? There's still gonna be a billion people with no identity There's still gonna be a couple of billion people who are unbanked Whilst it's absolutely important to be getting money into the right hands and giving agency and choice As quickly as possible today tomorrow every day There's also we need to look at a fundamental system and that that's what Kiva protocol does And as you say we'll come back to that in a second But I wanted to touch on Kiva capital because I think some of the people in the room and might be experiencing this Transition or wanting to transition from maybe non-profit Capital into sort of more institutional capital and one of the things I think is really interesting, you know I hear a lot about if you build it they will come and that's really not been the case a lot with impact It's been going to the investors and the financial institutions and saying what is it you need? Which I think it's very interesting the thematic funds that you have But is there any sort of advice you might have about sort of making that transition to institutional capital? I mean experience a lot of the groundwork and the hard work was done for that like before I joined So I got to turn up and get the glory of launching Kiva capital, but the Keep the thing that allowed us to launch it fast is is having the track record So we have you're more than one point four billion dollars of loans that we have Granular person-by-person month-by-month repayment data on so we can we have a track record So that's important, but it's the other thing that I that I mentioned is that we can do these impact slices so we can go to a Foundation or you know a private sector and say you know we could we could create a fund like this Or it could be a bit more like this and we can kind of co-create and we can craft Impact and returns that meet their criteria, and I think that that's really been something quite unique I should also say on Kiva capital that we just paid back our first institutional funding came from opic from David Who was just there and we paid it back I think like yesterday or a couple of days ago, so I get to go to their drinks I hear they're good, but they were a pick were a Epic were really catalytic and as they were talking about they came in first to allow us to prove that we could put institutional capital to work So we we really appreciate that and Maybe that blended finance sort of helps sort of get you there towards that. Would you say that for sure? Yeah And then skull also Participated in that and and helped so opic and skull have really helped us to sort of transform from a crowdfunding platform To having a more institutional track record that we can then go out on market So you go from so you got 1.4 billion capital being moved in financial inclusion which solves a hell of a lot of the SDGs to be honest That's being expanded then you move into sort of institutional money bringing even more capital in creating an asset class of financial inclusion To be honest and then that's not enough. It's time for a systems change Which I think we don't talk about enough as I said before So do you want to just talk a bit more in-depth about what the protocol is and what you didn't see early on so caveat Keep a protocol is a blockchain project. So some people may want to leave now. There's a very mixed feelings about it But I want to go back to where it came from because it didn't start with a let's do a blockchain project It turned out that that was the right technical solution for the problem But it actually started out I was in I said in the first few months when I was on this on this world tour I was out in rural Kenya and It was just talking to people about their lives and particularly about the financial lives and this and a woman in Kenya was it sort of Walking me through how she got a cow loan and got some more loans and built this farm And she got another loan and built this hardware store and she'd been borrowing and repaying for 20 years You know thousand dollars or so at a time one-year loans 30% or so interest rate I mean many of you have Understand exactly how this works from various sources including some Kiva sources and and I'm saying well what's next? You know what you're you're such an awesome entrepreneur. What are you gonna do next? So well, I've got this plot of land and my dream is to build this house for my family for three generations My family on this land like cool So maybe I come back in a couple of years and get the house tour is a no I'm never gonna build that house. You know, I've got the land but the house will never get built You know like not in my lifetime say wow, that's that's terrible Why why is that and and she sort of explained not in the not in these words? But she explained like all of my loans have been you know, they've we've been different providers And they're not centralized and they're not recorded to be credit history Like I don't have a I don't have a credit rating and I don't have an identity that it's all tied to and I'm like, huh And as I was getting the the plane back is like but we have some identity for her, right? And we have credit we have several million dollars people several million people's Identity and credit history on our servers in Silicon Valley Colo up the street And we just don't share them with anyone, right? If you take our several hundred partners, they have Hundreds of millions of identities and credit histories. So it's actually not that this isn't being recorded It's not being recorded in the right format and it's not being done in a way that can be shared and we could move Billions and billions of dollars and it's not gonna change the fundamental situation of That woman or many many people like her unless we get it recorded and she's led this exemplary Financial life. She's a much better credit risk than I am. I'm certain of that and and yet it just doesn't show up She doesn't gain the benefit of that and so we started to sort so the thought experiment of how would we put our data and get Others to put their data and it's really about data. It's not about the money. The money will follow and And so we started to just build technology to do this and we built this prototype system Which had to have some characteristics of being very very cheap digital identity We had a real strong human rights view that it has to be self-suffering identity Meaning we don't own it the government doesn't own it the person owns their identity We had to be the data the credit record had to be separate from the identity because you know Equal facts. That's not a good look. We don't want to do that You know a whole bunch of things we're like well How would we design the system and we and we came to this idea of doing this decentralized ledger system Where a density could truly be owned by the individual where the data is across a bunch of distributed databases Which we are no one else has access to all of all of this stuff. Oh, okay Well, if we really want to do system change real system change, how would we implement this? The you know the way to do it would be go to governments and get governments to adopt it for their entire population That would be the single best way to do this because if you do 70 80 countries like this You've you've solved the whole problem. And so we said well, you know We probably need a country between 1 to 10 million people quite high financial exclusion You know a bunch of criteria and we worked with UNDP and UNCDF to just go go talk to central bankers and ministers of finance and so on and The UN German Assembly last year actually much to our surprise in some ways The president of Sierra Leone stood up on stage and said and so we're adopting Kiva protocol as our national system And he said oh wow, okay And I guess we have to actually build this and and we started so we started building it in January and just a month ago The first Sierra Leonean Nancy Fingerprinted in and in less than three seconds performed an EKYC check to prove who she is And she'd previously been rejected by a bank six times. She didn't have the documents and so on So the the systems live in less than a year by the end of this year every Sierra Leonean So 5.3 million adults will have Go in fingerprint in perform the KYC check So basically full full inclusion for everyone and by the end of next year We will have every MFI bank and credit union wired up into the systems So we'll have gone end-to-end in Sierra Leone in in less than two years Which is also importantly less than less than a presidential election term So And maybe we'll come back to that point in just a second But it's so it's not just Sierra Leone You're working with another two countries and then there's a whole list of others that are on your radar Yeah, so Sierra Leone's read the test case We wanted to you know prove the tech works prove that it's gonna get adopted all of these all of these things But the real the goal of this is to roll this out to to many many countries And it's not it's low-level tech right other people will build all kinds of applications on top of it what we're aiming to provide is a Format and open source low-level Code for wallets and for distributed ledger and we work with the central bank We work with the credit agency if there is one we work with the identity issuer to connect all this stuff in Because that's the thing most of this already exists. It's just not it's not in the right format And it's not pulled together so our kind of trick or our goal here is just to take what there is Put it into very contemporary data formats and go really really quickly so that the whole system gets stood up in one go Which I think it's a bit the trick. Yeah, and we don't have time to talk about it today but obviously the importance of that of keep your protocol as an increasing number of people are forced to leave their countries due to climate I Mean it's just invaluable really to have have that kind of technology That allows them to take the credit with them and that's just for for migration for any reason, you know once someone has this You know UN TDF whoever or UNHCR can set up a fingerprint scanner on the other end Other end the person can walk up fingerprint in pull up their identity and bring their financial history with them as well And as you know clearly as we all know what we're seeing is unfortunately You know people coming refugees for very long periods of time and being able to get identity and get there and bring their credit history with them I think it's very transformational for being able to come, you know productive and integrated in the next country I know it's it want to give you you cutos because um, you know, it's very daunting to think about systems change We're gonna go and work with the government, but you were really strategic about who you're partnering with around the timing of the elections I don't know Time but if you can just mention that because I think it's crucial to be strategic Yeah, I mean we have we have a general operating thesis on this that That the timing like when I say we can go end-to-end in a country in two years and bring Every person every financial system every financial institution into the system I do think that timing point is critical and when we are prioritizing countries We particularly look for countries work which has a new administration that's prioritizing Financial inclusion and that has kind of tech like some level of technical competency and so on and actually as we've done this scan I think there's a lot of countries in the world that Don't meet that criteria So and I guess just to to wrap up for the evening is there Anything sort of in particular that you would sort of draw on as being Sort of advice to to those who are sitting there thinking about how we can really move from like scale up impact in the biggest way Towards system change. Are there any sort of key requirements that you've noticed? I mean, I guess personal reflections on what we do at least I'm not sure how applicable they are for others But certainly reflections from the Kiva experience is one I mean the Kiva brand and track record which others others did way before I joined It's been so critical to be viewed as sort of an honest broker in the space So I think you know whether you have that directly or partnering with someone who has that I really do think it's been It will be inconceivable for me to do this outside of Kiva as a sort of a fresh thing So I think that's really important as one in the second hat just having having Having for us having that technology DNA has been really critical to this I mean my view is at least for some systems change technology is really the key because if we were 5.3 million people you can only really do that at least at that in that time frame with technology So that's the second thing and then the third thing is for very large-scale governments are I mean our experience with the government of Sierra Leone's really been terrific. It like it really has so it's kind of the Conventional wisdom at least around here is like avoid the government avoid government But like our experience with opics been terrific Domestically our experience with the government of Sierra Leone has been terrific So for me, that's actually like quite a new learning about how do you how do you both be truly mission-oriented? Move fast with technology, but also partner with governments I think you can get all of those things together huge change is possible And you've done in such a short time as well. So thank you so much. It's been great and