Editor’s note: In addition to being informative, this post also outlines what IFMR Trust is looking for in potential hires. If you would like to see that immediately, go after the jump.
Before Thanksgiving break I had the pleasure of sitting down at an informal roundtable with Dave Wallack, Senior Vice President of People to learn more about IFMR Trust‘s ambitious plans to provide financial inclusion to every person in India. Chaired by Dr Nachiket Mor, who is also the President of the ICICI Foundation for Inclusive Growth, the Trust’s mission is to “ensure that every individual and every enterprise has complete access to financial services.” In order to accomplish this goal, the Trust is looking at a rather unconventional business model that where the non-profit parent oversees multiple self-sufficient for-profit silos in various financial sectors.
The three ventures that the Trust has currently launched are the IFMR Trust Holding Company (ITHC), the IFMR Trust Advisory Services (ITAS) and the IFMR Trust Guarantee Company (ITGC). Each venture has a specific and distinct goal. The ITHC aims to build a network of Kshetriya Gramin Financial Services (KGFS) that will serve as low-cost, paperless branches providing access to financial products. According to Wallack, the goal is to have one of these branches for every 10,000 people or 2,000 households. Wallack emphasized the feasibility of such scale is due to the incredibly low-cost structure of each branch. By being completely paperless, transaction costs is on the scale of 20-30 rupees as opposed to $20 dollars. Wallack self-titled the initiative as the Starbucks of microfinance, as they are able to provide loans at only 11.5%, far less than the typical 20-30% charged by traditional MFIs.
The ITAS’ charge recognizes that microfinance is merely a stopgap or defensive measure and that more aggressive financial services will be needed to enable true inclusion. In order to do this, the ITAS has structured as essential a private equity firm and with the aim of raising $150 US. Utilizing this capital, ITAS will look at 14 different supply chains that reach the rural population and figure out ways of improving and fixing them through investments in operating companies along the product cycle. These investment strategies, organized as Network Enterprises, will operate in a for-profit fashion with the belief that the quest for profits will seek out the most efficient and effective ways to address the supply chain breakdowns.
One example is the current gap that exists between urban labor demand and rural supply. After some preliminary research, ITAS discovered that the major hurdle was that rurual workers could not afford to live anywhere in the city for their first 2 weeks, because they had yet to been paid. In order to resolve this ITAS partnered with a local temporary housing and staffing company in order to provide that stopgap housing for these workers.
Finally, the ITGC will focus on providing much needed debt capital to small and medium size enterprises throughout India to truly enable them to grow. Here, the organization is partnering with many existing financial providers to roll out their offerings more aggressively.
In order to staff all of these initiatives, IFMR Trust is actively looking to hire bright and driven individuals. Wallack outlined the following criteria for working at an Network Enterprise:
Job Description: Essentially one would help run these self-sustaining initiatives
- Management Consultant: perform the research necessary to identify the problem and to develop a solution
- Investor: Actually perform the necessary due diligence to make investments along the supply chain
- Business Development: Actively source demand for the new product or service
Requirements
- Finance Background
- Experience: ideally operational or project management
- Sectoral Expertise
- Strong Entrepreneurial Spirit: As Wallack said, they want people who truly buy into the American Dream to come over and inspire others
You can find a partial list of openings here.