Sunshine Bank

Over one billion people live in extreme poverty. Current government and non-profit solutions are piecemeal efforts and do not address core issues of poverty and lack of opportunity in rural areas. Local incentives are required for sustainable development. Muhammed Yunus pioneered the idea of microfinance in Bangladesh in the 1980’s. Yunus offered small loans to poor entrepreneurs. Our proposal, Sunshine Bank, is to build on Yunus’s idea of small loans and additionally offer the full palette of financial services to the world’s poor: checking accounts, saving accounts, teller banking, portfolio management, and financial education. The poor are not the high risk investors that many assume; most MFI’s have repayment rates of 97-99%. Investing in the poor will allow us to capture a largely untapped market. Sunshine Bank will operate in developing countries around the world.