Empowerment
At the core of everything we do is a common mission: to empower people. Whether for our customers, our business partners, or our team members, we seek to provide the tools and resources that people need to fulfill their personal goals.
We believe that through business and the private sector we are most able to efficiently mobilize substantial human and capital resources to realize sustainable, long-term, and widespread change. For this reason, we have created a portfolio of double-bottom-line businesses, starting with MPOWER Ventures and MPOWER Labs and including all of our portfolio companies, whose success is measured equally on both profit and social impact.
Likewise, we invest only in businesses whose products and services deliver true empowerment, enabling consumers to gain access to tools and resources that will improve their quality of life.
Entrepreneurship
We believe that entrepreneurs are a powerful source of innovation and transformation worldwide. For that reason, we have made entrepreneurs the main focus of what we do – whether that is making venture investment in early-stage companies, attracting established entrepreneurs to join the team at MPOWER Labs, empowering micro-entrepreneurs with our products and services, or building RISE – the first conference of its kind for and by entrepreneurs.
At MPOWER Labs, we have created an environment in which our entrepreneurs-in-residence are empowered to realize their transformative ideas, and we work collectively to quickly build and execute innovative solutions that will succeed where others have failed.
Financial Services
The current focus of MPOWER Ventures and MPOWER Labs is the creation of innovative financial service solutions for the world’s underserved. Unfortunately, billions of people around the world lack access to safe, convenient, and affordable financial services. These individuals are living in a cash economy that has very high transaction costs, no opportunity for leverage or asset building, and leaves them in a permanent state of financial instability and insecurity. A major reason for this market failure is the prohibitively high cost of expansion of financial services by mainstream banks. As a result, the financial services available to these individuals are significantly limited, resulting in high prices, poor quality, and inadequate solutions.
Through investment in innovative, early-stage companies providing financial products and services to the underserved, the MPOWER group of companies is working to deliver access to safe, convenient, and affordable financial services for the world’s underserved. Our financial services build upon existing infrastructure, such as retail and mobile phone networks, to significantly reduce start-up and transaction costs and enable more rapid expansion to even the most remote corners of the world. Likewise, all of our products are developed with the underserved consumer in mind and utilize the least expensive, most accessible technologies available. Finally, recognizing the increasing interconnectedness of people around the world, we are building our product platforms with a global strategy that enables people to send and receive money from anywhere to anywhere around the world.