Bankable Frontier Weblog

I recently attended the World Resources Institute Conference of this name in San Francisco, subtitled “Making Business Work for the Poor”. Some 800 others were there. What distinguished this event from run of the mill conferences was the sheer diversity of the attendees: pinstriped corporates (and not the social responsibility types only or even mainly) rubbed shoulders with NGO activists and practitioners from the field.  This topic appears at least to be remixing the conference set!

Inspired by UN Private Sector Commission and the academic work of CK Prahalad who was a keynote speaker (of whom, see later post), the conference platformed the CEOs of large corporates who claim to have seen this light (among them, Carly Fiorina recently of HewlettPackard, Arun Sarun of Vodafone, Chris Rodrigues of VISA International) and who spoke of their various initiatives to extend services to poor people in a businesslike way. A veritable hive of parallel sessions considered topics such migrant remittances, developing mortgage markets and financial intermediaries.

The success of the conference started talk of a follow-up conference in 2005. What does all this interest mean for the bankable frontier? The good news is that providing services to poor people is now mainstream, legitimate. One can even imagine a financial analyst now asking a Fortune 500 company the previously unthinkable: “What is your strategy for the Bottom of the Pyramid”. The bad news is that the level of hype is far above the level of reality; almost all the case studies cited are in relatively early stages of important pilots. How those scale and demonstrate long run profitability remains to be seen. If they don’t within a few years, the fad will be over.