Investing in Financial Inclusion & the Bottom of the Pyramid

David Morningside had just started his new job as an investment associate at Columbia Impact Capital (CIC), an impact venture fund with a sterling reputation for investing in high-growth, high-impact social enterprises around the world. He was asked for his input on the three companies under consideration. CIC's most recent fund was thematically focused on solutions in the financial inclusion space. After perusing some data on the three investment opportunities, Morningside was struck by the range of solutions they offered including digital payments in East Africa, wealth management and advisory services for India's rural poor, and a mobile micro-insurer with global scale. Each of the three companies could create returns for the fund's investors and meaningfully improve the lives of some of the world's very poorest people, but CIC only had sufficient uncommitted capital to make a single investment before closing the current fund.