Tag Archives: banking

Discovering kiva.org

In all the recent posts I’ve been reading about peer-to-peer lending, including the excellent reporting by Jim Bruene at NetBanker and Colin Henderson at The Bankwatch and CommunityLend, I hadn’t come across Kiva.org.

I’m very excited about social personal finance and think it may well change the way people exchange money when they just need to borrow or invest a small to medium amount and don’t want to bother with a bank or credit union.

But tonight my aunt showed me Kiva.org, and I got to admit I was a little embarrassed to admit that I didn’t know what it was. It’s an amazing concept where anyone can make microloans to people in the developing world who need small amounts of money to start an enterprise. According to their website:

Kiva lets you connect with and loan money to unique small businesses in the developing world. By choosing a business on Kiva.org, you can “sponsor a business” and help the world’s working poor make great strides towards economic independence. Throughout the course of the loan (usually 6-12 months), you can receive email journal updates from the business you’ve sponsored. As loans are repaid, you get your loan money back.

You can cash out when you’re repaid or reinvest it into a new opportunity. I think this is genius. Did everyone else know about this and somehow I’m the last to the party? Hard to be shown up by my aunt after all…

I started tonight by investing $25. Kiva.org asks you for a 10% addition as a donation to keep them running. That’s optional. You can pay by PayPal or credit card. When you’re done you can easily send the info about the cause you donated to to your email list to spread the word. Nicely done.

Here’s who I donated to: Massan Aziado of Togo. Fantastic and inspiring!

The Members Project by Amex

I have been thinking about what to write about The Members Project, American Express’ new member engagement initiative. In case you’re not familiar with it, here’s the nutshell:

Amex is donating $1 for every cardholder (member) that registers on the site, up to a maximum of $5 million. Cardholders can propose worthwhile projects that need funding, and can discuss each others’ projects on the site. In stages of voting the ideas are winnowed down to a single winning project which will receive the funding.

I hope it’s a successful initiative. As an employee of a credit union, I can attest that it’s often difficult engaging members to take action, although their healthy marketing budget will help a lot. Makes me jealous. I like this kind of social marketing, which helps a company do well by doing good.

The clincher for me was that I did a Google blog search for The Members Project and the vast majority of the results were posts about worthwhile projects and initiatives that could use the money, as opposed to a meta-level discussion about the Amex initiative itself. That struck me as a very good sign.

Here’s what I searched.

Thoughts?