Hello, Andrea. Thank you for joining us today.
Hi, Doug. It's great to be with you.
Andrea it's been a pleasure to work with you,
Professor Yunus and Grameen America
over the past three years.
Can you tell us a little bit more about your organization
and the work that you do in the United States?
So, Grameen America is the fastest growing, largest,
microfinance organization in the United States.
We have served over 130,000 women entrepreneurs
and their families in 15 cities.
The organization's given out $1.5 billion
of loan capital,
which is a pretty extraordinary thing since 2008.
And that has been repaid at 99%
up until Covid-19.
So basically without any collateral,
and these are no recourse loans,
the trust and the relationship between our staff
and our members has yielded an extraordinary program.
These are women who prior to Grameen America,
are unable to access the traditional financial markets.
Business has been affected very negatively by COVID-19
businesses of all sizes.
What are some of the things that you've been doing
to support the members themselves
from a business resilience perspective?
We are waiving all interest on existing loans,
any third party transaction costs
that they've had in the past
even if they're as small as a dollar to help repay us,
we've covered those costs.
We don't want them to bear them.
And then really importantly,
we've restructured loans.
We are giving them more time to repay.
We are requiring them to pay less per week.
And in some cases we are issuing emergency loans
to some of the members who just need that bridge
to post Covid where they can resume their businesses.
Andrea, in recent weeks,
our BCG team has had the privilege
to work very closely with you and Grameen
to respond to the Covid-19 crisis.
What were some of the immediate things
that you did to change your business model
and your operating model?
The alchemy and the magic of the model
are women getting together every single week
in groups of 25, 30, 35,
and they're getting together to share,
to get financial training,
to understand the disciplines of repayment,
and that has been part of what we've been about
since we began here in the United States in 2008.
We made the decision
that we were going to go virtual
and pivot to a 100% no contact no meetings model,
which was huge for us.
So, envision 2,450
Zoom meetings,
with 30 women participating on each one,
and all the chaos that can come with that.
I mean these are members of ours
who have probably never participated in conference calls,
never mind passcode pounds before.
Now,
a hundred percent of our meetings every week
are virtual.
If you came to Grameen a few years ago,
our members would have to come to our offices
to get a check.
Luckily,
without even thinking about a pandemic,
we transitioned to a card.
So it is a Grameen card that has the rail set up,
so that a loan can be dispersed onto that card
from our major banks.
And that allows us to get money to her
without seeing her in person,
and without that,
it would be impossible to get that capital access to her.
We couldn't have done this without our partner PayNearMe.
We had started doing that pre-COVID-19,
but the adoption,
is nearly a hundred percent.
It has to be obviously out of necessity during this time.
And we think that that really bodes well for the future.
Here in the United States we have something called
the Payroll Protection Program,
which is a large government stimulus program
that many SMEs are using
as a way of getting short term loans,
that they may be able to convert to grants.
Obviously a lot of SMEs have struggled to get this,
again particularly difficult for your members.
What are some of the things that you,
well have you been able to help your members
on the PPP program,
and if so, what have you been able to do?
Let me just take this in two phases
because there's been two stimulus packages
and in the first stimulus package,
unfortunately we were not able to help our members.
Grameen America itself is not an SBA7a lender.
So we as an institution,
didn't have the ability to participate and give loans.
The second stimulus package, I feel great
because thanks to BCG's help who really helped us
look at well, what are we gonna do now?
Should we apply to be a PPP lender?
Or should we do something much more quickly,
which is really become an agent,
if you would,
and partner.
And that is what we ended up doing
based on the recommendation
and that was done within 48 hours or less.
So Opportunity Fund is an organization
based out in California
who was approved to lend and very quickly,
they've got a phenomenal CEO,
Luz Urrutia and her team.
They decided that they wanted to help us.
So, again overnight,
we funneled our loans for our members
through the Opportunity Fund
and were able to stand up the application process.
$6,000 can change a member's life.
A thousand dollars can change a member's life
and we were able to process that size of loan,
which is truly,
there's just so many tiny businesses
that need that kind of help.
Andrea, thank you again for joining us today.
It's been a pleasure.
Wonderful to talk to you.