Bloom Money has raised £1m to digitalise an informal financial management system employed by ethnic communities across the world.
The system has been put in place to avoid conventional banking systems, as part of the rotating savings and credit association (ROSCA) model.
Unfortunately, this is due to Bloom Money’s disenfranchisement with the established system, with the organisation’s CEO Nina Mohanty describing it as “blatant racism.”
She stated: “Some of it is just blatant racism. We don’t have clear red-lining like in the U.S., but there are definitely postcode look-ups.
“The ROSCA system is a way to conduct financial matters with people you trust, whether that is by race, nationality, we’ve even got people down to the tribe level, Bloom Money wants to digitize this ROSCA process.”
Mohanty says she decided to work on this problem after she moved to the U.K. and learned for herself just how difficult it can be for an immigrant to set themselves up financially.
“I just felt that there was not just an economic justice point to this, but also a huge opportunity, where people only think of the U.S. as a country of immigrants, but increasingly across Europe, we know migration is growing,” she said.”
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