The last several years

Over the last several years, the world has woken up to the enormous market potential of serving 2-3 billion people at the base of the economic pyramid. A growing cadre of investors recognizes that we can create new ways to meet the needs of this huge population in a sustainable, business-like way. A new wave of socially responsible funds, institutional investors, microfinance investment vehicles, banks and even conventional venture and private equity funds collectively have raised billions to invest in social enterprises.

Lack of bold technology among entrepreneurs

This shortage does not bespeak a lack of bold technology among entrepreneurs. A host of new entrants, many of them based in Africa, Asia and Latin America, are pioneering innovative solutions to help the poor access quality financial services, building on technological advances just as the spread of mobile phones, expanding access to the Internet, and new ways of doing business with cloud computing and big data analysis to improve outreach, reduce cost, and increase convenience and affordability. Frontiers include:

Mobile phone-based businesses aspiring to create a world of branchless banking that may include services like savings accounts, remittances, credit and micro-insurance;

Specialized credit to finance micro, small and medium sized enterprises, housing and education, and sustainable energy initiatives; Online or social media approaches that are pioneering peer-to-peer lending and other internet-based financial services; Pay-as-you-go or lease-to-own models for energy products, modular housing and other "embedded" financial services. These start-ups have the potential to both complement and disrupt completely our concept of how to provide services to the poor. They run into trouble, not because they don't have passion and ideas, however because they face extraordinary challenges in undeveloped markets - isolated and uneducated customer bases, suppliers with limited capabilities, and poor infrastructure, to name just a few. They need formidable resources - financial and managerial - to successfully prove their new business models and technologies.

The right kind of help

Can impact investors provide the right kind of help by the by? At present, as the Monitor report notes, "few impact investors seem prepared to provide money and technical assistance in these before stagesThis poses the question: how will promising inclusive business models get to these later stages where they become investable without support before on in their journey?"

What's required on the financial front is patient investing, focused on businesses that are previously in their development cycle than those as a general rule considered "investable." This capital must be risk-tolerant, provided in combination with technical and strategic expertise, as then as access to potential partners and, when appropriate, later-stage investors. At this critical stage, small amounts of capital with hands-on support can have a huge impact.

To that end, Accion has launched a new initiative - Venture Lab - dedicated to providing seed capital and management support to start-ups at a stage when their product or service is ready to test the market nevertheless has not but proved its ability to generate revenue. The amounts are small - for the most part $100,000 to $300,000 - yet tailored to the needs of companies at this hour. Venture Lab will provide not only convertible debt and equity to portfolio companies, but as well a dedicated team to assist with early-stage tasks just as path-to-scale strategy, analytics, financial modeling and business development

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