The Cartier Women’s Initiative honors Carmina Bayombong, for her educational advocacy
The Cartier Women’s Initiative honors twenty-one women entrepreneurs, including Filipina Carmina Bayombong, for her educational advocacy for underserved youth
Acollaboration by Cartier, INSEAD Business School and McKinsey and Company, the Cartier Women’s Initiative Awards is a business plan competition created to give women entrepreneurs a platform for their projects. Twenty-one women, with three per continent, are awarded each year. Divided into two groups of 7 Laureates and 14 Finalists, the Laureates are given $100,000 in prize money with one-on-one personalized business mentoring while the Finalists are given $30,000 in prize money.
“By 2020 we plan to license it to banks and schools to develop more effective loan
programs”
This year, Filipina Carmina Bayombong is one of the Laureates. The daughter of an entrepreneur, Carmina was inspired by her parents’ story of putting in hard work for success. “They came from
great poverty and worked hard to succeed,” she says. “When I was young they founded a cooperative in our village that has now grown into a small bank. They taught me from a young age how to save and use money wisely!”
Carmina trained to be an industrial engineer, which gave her a desire to fix systems and processes. During her university days, she saw dozens of fellow classmates struggle in their study due to financial constraints, despite studying at a state university. “They were taking on extra jobs and failing to meet their academic potential,” Carmina explains. “Some even dropped out.” She noticed that the issue came from transport and food costs, which amounted to an average of $1350 a year.
When Carmina decided to crunch the numbers, she was frustrated with what she saw. According to the Philippines Commission of Higher Education, only 12% of university institutions at the undergraduate and post-graduate levels are state-run. When private tuition fees are included, students are overstretched with money problems. According to the Philippine Statistics Authority, the average low-income household lives on no more than $1,900 a year. With a dream towards wanting to help everyone, she could achieve his or her goals of higher education, Carmina and co-founder Melissa Dee decided to put up invested.
invested is a student loan service, which focuses on marginalized students. Due to their lack of credit scoring, the usual bank loans are not open to them. The other avenue of government loans gives no help, as their stringent requirements require proof of income from parents. “Most marginalized and unbanked students’ parents have informal jobs, they cannot prove their household income,” says Carmina.
To combat the issue, invested set up a three-tier platform to select candidates in most need, draw investors, and ensure repayment. With a propriety credit-scoring algorithm that measures the likelihood of graduation, career success, and non-payment risk, Carmina says the future is ripe to help those most in need. “By 2020 we plan to license it to banks and schools to develop more effective loan programs,” says Carmina. Institutional lenders are targeted, with an average of 7-12% per annum repaid.
invested has also developed the Borrower Success platform, a program that focuses on training and coaching employment and financial literacy, so borrowers can get a step up and ensure repayment. Because of this, the average time between graduation and employment for invested borrowers is just 27 days, which is below the national average. Right now, invested is open to students in the last two years of university, and to date has loaned a total $200,000 to 276 students and enjoys a 100% repayment rate, of which 82% is repaid on time. Today, invested is now attracting more investors and setting its sights on 2,000 students for its loans. The future is robust for more students who will be helped by invested’s innovative and generous gift to society.