The 2015 Fintech Finance 35: Michael Schlein, Accion International

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< The 2015 Fintech Finance 35

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Michael Schlein
President and Chief Executive Officer
Accion International

Equally at home in corporate and public service roles, Michael Schlein is currently straddling those worlds while pursuing an emerging-markets fintech strategy. A former senior Citigroup executive and U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission chief of staff, Schlein since 2009 has been president and CEO of Cambridge, Massachusetts–based Accion International, a nonprofit founded in 1961 that has been instrumental in building 64 microfinance institutions in 32 countries. On a financial-inclusion track parallel to that of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (see Rodger Voorhies, No. 20), Accion has established two vehicles that are channeling capital toward technology in the developing world: Frontier Investments Group, targeting early- and growth-stage companies since 2009, and Venture Lab, which has invested in about 20 seed-stage start-ups since 2012. “Between the two we have an extraordinary pipeline of disruptive companies that are trying to change the way we meet the financial needs of the poor,” says Schlein, 54. For example, Frontier owns an interest in Tiaxa, a Chilean company that operates primarily in Southeast Asia, applying sophisticated analytics to cell phone usage to make instant assessments of customers’ creditworthiness, even for minuscule “nano-loans.” Explains Schlein, “Transaction sizes are no longer too small.” Another portfolio company, U.K.-based Azimo, brings down the cost of the cross-border remittances that many immigrant populations depend on. Schlein, who in 2014 was appointed by New York Mayor Bill de Blasio to be chairman of the city’s Economic Development Corp., contends that “all the charity in the world” won’t bring more than 2 billion people worldwide out of poverty. “You need to harness the financial markets.”

The 2015 Fintech Finance 35