Innovators and volunteers celebrating two days at the ingenuity19 summit in MaGIC, Malaysia’s Global Innovation Centre

Collaboration sparks innovation that help foster sustainable economic growth and drive positive outcomes for civil society. Just last week, I was part of Ingenuity19’s first ‘Tech for Good’ Summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and it was inspiring to see several innovative ideas for social good take shape.

The summit was attended by a diverse group of innovators - social entrepreneurs, tech trailblazers, and academicians. Ingenuity19 is the University of Nottingham’s annual innovation event designed to use diverse stakeholders to discover and develop enterprising ideas to transform the future. At the end of the summit, the best ideas were judged and competition prizes awarded up to the total value in excess of £150,000.

Since 2014, Experian’s Social Innovation programme has invested in 23 internally-sourced projects designed to help some of the most disadvantaged or vulnerable people on the planet to get access to financial services that are made either accessible or affordable through our innovations. We were eager to get involved in Ingenuity19 in the UK and Malaysia to see whether we can discover new potential social innovation investments by combining our talent with groups outside the organisation to generate brand new ideas that might not otherwise have been thought of.

Part of that also gave our own colleagues the opportunity to volunteer their skills to collaborate with people and groups outside of their immediate teams, and to develop new skills.

Focus on social innovation

Our team shared with Grameen Foundation their insights in bridging access to everyday essential services to the world’s 1.2 billion underbanked. Once the social context had been set, the innovators were given two financial inclusion challenges to solve in serving the needs of low income communities, with a particular focus on women:

1. Demand for financial services: Due to multiple factors such as lack of awareness and pricing, the demand and actual usage of financial services is quite low amongst low income communities.
2. Viable business model to serve low income customers: The viability of serving low income customers with small ticket size of transactions/ relationships is a question mark. The financial service providers have been struggling to come up with viable and scalable business models that also serve low income customers.

There were some really interesting ideas and outcomes from the workshops; strengthening our belief on why organisations need to invest the time in empowering future leaders and innovators to believe in their ideas and collaborate with larger organisations to provide new and sustainable solutions to real world problems. With the support of Grameen Foundation the winning team is developing their bid for the overarching competition to bring their solution to tackle financial inclusion in rural communities by growing digital financial identities of girls in India early at school.

Our panel sharing their stories on innovative careers with
Experian’s Chai Ping, Lam Chen Riang, Arvind Ragavan and Dev Dhiman (from left to right)

Creating a better tomorrow

At Experian, we have been constantly striving to create a better tomorrow; driving a culture of responsible innovation and collaboration to build robust financial identities and improve financial accessibility. Since 2014, we have invested over $9 million in social innovation projects, that has touched over 13 million people globally improving their access to essential services.

The Experian X Labs, an innovation ecosystem, is an example of our commitment where the team leverages alternative data, advanced analytics and partnerships with industry organisations to develop technology solutions that will bridge the gap between the unbanked and financial service providers.

There’s a lot more to be done and events such as Ingenuity provides organisations a platform to identify and engage with top talent, empower them to innovate, solve real world problems and to create a better tomorrow – equitable, inclusive, and innovative.

If you are interested to know more about how Experian has been at the forefront of industry-leading social innovation, please contact us here.

Dev Dhiman

Managing Director, SEA & Emerging Markets