Industries across the country are getting a much needed reminder about their lack of progress when it comes to diversity; Jennifer Tescher, Founder & CEO of the Financial Health Network, writes in Forbes that fintech in particular needs to deliver on the promise of serving the underserved; according to a Harvard Business School study in 2016 only 3 percent of venture investors were Black and fewer than 1 percent of founders were Black; fintechs have always said they can deliver services to more people and more efficiently than banks, which translates to more underserved communities being added to the financial system; many of the industry’s biggest leaders talked about democratizing access to credit, payments and investing; through the Financial Solutions Lab Tescher found that investment is needed even earlier than the early product stage, Black entrepreneurs need capital at the ideation and incubation stage; Georgetown law professor Chris Brummer recently described the gravity of the problem in a piece on Medium: “If fintech fails to innovate where it counts the most, it will be doomed to repeat the failures of the very system it seeks to replace.” Forbes.
