Tag Archives | eko financial services

Empowering Bihar’s rural health workers with mobile phones and money transfer

By on September 8, 2011 in Banking, Healthcare

[Editor's Note: Since Jan 2011, Norway India Partnership Initiative (NIPI) has been leading the implementation of a mobile money transfer pilot for ASHAs in Bihar's Sheikhpura district. At the pilot's 5-month mark, Lalitha Iyer (Gender Advisor to NIPI) created an interim findings report based on her field visit and interactions with 80 ASHAs and other [...]

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Why I Like These Social Enterprises – Part 1

By on July 18, 2011 in General

It recently struck me that I should start adding a “What I like about <enterprise x>” section to each post. The section would include social metrics the enterprise is purportedly trying to influence. Instead of editing scores of old posts, I decided to do a round-up post, organizing the posts by category. Agriculture Our first [...]

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Eko India Financial Services raises $5.5 million round from Creation Investments

By on July 10, 2011 in Banking

We had written about Eko Financial Services in a two-part series (Part 1 linked here). Today they are announcing the closing of a $5.5 million funding round from Creation Investments, a Chicago-based social ventures fund. I had a chat with Abhishek Sinha (Eko co-Founder & CEO) soon after their funding closed and he shared some [...]

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Khata Kholo Har Darwaza Kholo – Eko’s Branchless Banking (Part 2)

By on May 12, 2011 in Banking

This is part 2 of our coverage on Eko‘s Branchless Banking solution play (Part 1 is here). Eko-SBI-Migrants = Win-Win-Win As you may recall from our earlier analysis (Banking for India’s Domestic Migrants), nearly 50% of migrants prefer to use banks for remittances but only 30% actually use banks. They yearn for the security and [...]

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Khata Kholo Har Darwaza Kholo – Eko’s Branchless Banking (Part 1)

By on May 1, 2011 in Banking, Y' Turks

[Editor's Note: A few weeks ago I had an engaging phone conversation with Abhishek Sinha, co-founder and CEO of Eko Financial Services, a trailblazing branchless banking social enterprise that's making a dramatic difference to the lives of India's migrants. This two-part series draws extensively from our phone conversation, follow-up email exchanges, and related research. Khata [...]

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