< The 2015 Fintech Finance 35

20
Rodger Voorhies
Director, Financial Services for the Poor
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

One of 11 global development initiatives of the Seattle-based Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Financial Services for the Poor has an ambitious goal of financial inclusion via technology: By 2035, it hopes, 60 percent of the world’s impoverished adults will be actively using digital money accounts. “We’re on track to making that happen,” declares the initiative’s director, Rodger Voorhies. Citing World Bank estimates that at least 2.5 billion adults lack financial institution accounts, the foundation advocates access to banking and payment services as a path out of poverty and is channeling grants toward that end. In Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Nigeria and Pakistan — five of eight targeted countries that together represent 65 percent of the world’s financially disenfranchised population — Voorhies’s team works with local digital payments system developers to expand their services to the unbanked. In Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, the Gates Foundation has invested in mobile money ventures. Now that an infrastructure is in place in East Africa, the foundation is working to expand financial product offerings. “In five years mobile money has achieved what the banking system in Tanzania couldn’t do in 50 years,” Voorhies notes: The four mobile money players — M-Pesa, Tigo Pesa, Z-Pesa and Zap — reach 30 percent of low-income people, compared with traditional banks’ 10 percent penetration. Venture capitalists “are increasingly crowding into this space,” observes Voorhies, 51, who has an MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and served as CEO of Opportunity Bank of Malawi and Opportunity Bank of Serbia before joining the foundation in 2011. “What they’re not crowding into yet is the bottom of the pyramid, and that’s where it is philanthropic capital’s role to lead.” In September the Gates Foundation invited as one of its latest Grand Challenges Explorations, eligible for $100,000 initial grants, proposals for “an innovative analytics or data capture solution to improve the delivery and use of digital financial services in developing countries.”

 
The 2015 Fintech Finance 35

1. James Robinson III & James Robinson IV RRE Ventures 2. Jane Gladstone Evercore Partners 3. Matthew Harris Bain Capital Ventures Building Resilient Portfolios: Infrastructure’s Strategic Advantage Sponsored by IFM Investors May 9, 2025 4. Steven McLaughlin Financial Technology Partners 5. Jonathan Korngold General Atlantic

6. Richard Garman & Brad Bernstein FTV Capital 7. Amy Nauiokas & Sean Park Anthemis Group 8. Thomas Jessop Goldman Sachs Group 9. Meyer (Micky) Malka Ribbit Capital 10. Hans Morris Nyca Partners

11. Maria Gotsch Partnership Fund for New York City 12. Marc Andreessen Andreessen Horowitz 13. Barry Silbert Digital Currency Group 14. Jay Reinemann Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria 15. Mariano Belinky Santander InnoVentures

16. François Robinet AXA Strategic Ventures 17. Vanessa Colella Citi Ventures 18. Alan Freudenstein & Gregory Grimaldi Credit Suisse NEXT Fund 19. Justin Brownhill & Neil DeSena SenaHill Partners 20. Rodger Voorhies Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

21. Michael Schlein Accion International 22. Kenneth Marlin Marlin & Associates 23. Rumi Morales CME Ventures 24. Mark Beeston Illuminate Financial Management 25. Vladislav Solodkiy Life.SREDA

26. Fabian Vandenreydt Innotribe SWIFT 27. Derek White Barclays 28. Alex Batlin UBS 29. Jeffrey Greenberg & Vincenzo La Ruffa Aquiline Capital Partners 30. P. Howard Edelstein REDI Holdings

31. Nektarios Liolios Startupbootcamp FinTech 32. Roy Bahat Bloomberg Beta 33. Andrew McCormack Valar Ventures 34. Lawrence Wintermeyer Innovate Finance 35. Janos Barberis FinTech Hong Kong