Building a business is hard, harder still to build a business that serves the poor. There are no ready-made templates. There is a limited understanding of low-income consumers, they are tougher to reach, slower to adopt digital platforms and have limited digital footprints. While new technology platforms are being built that potentially make the cost economics of serving this segment work, deploying these emergent platforms is often technically challenging. The Financial Inclusion Lab is an accelerator program that seeks to identify, nurture and bring to scale promising innovations that significantly enhance the financial health of the underserved by equipping them with access to capital, markets, insights, training, and support they need to overcome these challenges and scale up.

The Bharat Inclusion Champions is a virtual Entrepreneur-in-Residence program that supports entrepreneurs in the early stages of working on novel financial inclusion use-cases. Promising use-cases are supported from the idea-stage all the way to market validation. The program has a strong preference for new-to-market ideas and non-incremental improvements leveraging the India Stack platform and utilizing the data being generated to serve the financial services needs of Bharat.