A Good Week for Social Impact: PayPal at SOCAP
This week, PayPal participated in
SOCAP15, the world’s largest convening of innovators working to change the world for the better. In its eighth year, the event brought together thousands of entrepreneurs, investors, foundations, governments and businesses committed to increasing the flow of capital toward social good.
As part of PayPal’s presence at SOCAP, we convened a conversation about the future of financing for small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) around the world. Titled
Breaking Down Barriers to Growth: Innovations in Alternative Lending, the session explored trends and insights from the growing global movement, as well as different models that are helping to remove barriers to growth for entrepreneurs. Bringing together Premal Shah of
Kiva, Max Schorr of
GOOD and our head of
PayPal Working Capital, Darrell Esch, our discussion focused on a few thematic areas:
- The origins of PayPal and Kiva’s SMB lending work and an overview of our efforts in the space. While our PayPal Working Capital program is a revenue-based financing model and Kiva’s Zip program is a peer-to-peer lending model, both were developed with the aspiration to level the playing field for SMBs and provide new opportunities for people around the world. As Darrell said in his remarks, we’re not just in the lending business – “we’re in the dream business.”
- The positive social impacts of our work, including powerful borrower stories. As both Darrell and Premal noted, our models aren’t just increasing access to finance, but also decreasing the cost of participation and, in turn, helping to build a fairer financial system for all. This not only has profound positive impacts on individual business owners, but also their families and communities – not to mention the others in their networks that they inspire and enable to become entrepreneurs as well.
- The areas where continued innovation and experimentation is still necessary. From more geographies and populations (particularly in emerging markets), to different loan sizes and delivery mechanisms, to new models of evaluating and minimizing risk – what’s clear is that we’re still early in the development of the alternative lending space and we see lots of exciting opportunity ahead.
At PayPal we believe in the power of our business to drive meaningful, lasting social impact. We were pleased to share this vision with the SOCAP community this year and to meet so many like-minded individuals and organizations from across the globe. Together, we’ll change the world!
Tyler Spalding, Lead Manager, Social Innovation