Vikram Akula

< PREV NEXT >

1998

Vikram Akula

Swayam Krishi Sangam (SKS)

http://www.sksindia.com

Hyderabad, India

Community Improvement & Economic Development

The Bold Idea:

SKS Microfinance, an NGO-turned-for-profit company, applies global business best practices to the field of microfinance.  It was launched in 1997 because of a fundamental flaw in microfinance—namely, its inability to scale to large numbers. SKS identied the constraints to scaling as the three “Cs”—lack of capital, capacity constraints, and the high costs of delivering miro-loans. SKS has overcome this challenge on the basis of three innovative principles: (1) using a profit-oriented model to overcome capital constraints (2) leveraging best practices for scaling from the business world to overcome capacity constraint (3) using technology to automate processes and lower costs. SKS’s profit-oriented model has attracted major equity investments from premier venture capitalists, including Vinod Khosla (co-founder of Sun Microsystems), Sequoia, (an early investor in companies such as Cisco, Yahoo and Google) and Ravi Reddy (co-founder of Think Systems). This, in turn, has led to the ability to leverage debt from banks. Indeed, as of November 2007, SKS had lent over 15 billion rupees ($400 million) to over 1,300,000 poor women, benefiting approximately 6 million individuals.

Known as the ‘Starbucks of Microfinance’, SKS also standardizes and automates microfinance processes. From training field officers using a standard methodology and toolkit to shaving seconds off field operations with a stopwatch to streamlined processes of entering data, SKS has created an extremely standardized operational practice that can be widely scaled. For these best practices, SKS was given the ABN AMRO/Planet Finance Process Excellence Award and the Grameen Foundation USA Excellence Award. SKS also automates microfinance through back office and field technology. Rather than rely on manually-filled collection sheets and manually entering data in ledgers, SKS created its own automated Management Information System (MIS) that is incredibly user-friendly so field staff with just a high school education can manage the system independently. In this fashion, a loan officer can handle up to 1,000 customers with a portfolio of 3 million rupees—a standard unheard of in microfinance.

SKS’s work in automation has won the CGAP Pro-Poor Innovation Award, the Digital Partners SEL Award and the award for Excellence in Information Integrity. The combination of these three innovative principles have led to sustained organization growth rates of 200%.

Biography:

Vikram Akula is the Founder and CEO of SKS Microfinance, one of the leading microfinance institutions in the world.  Vikram launched SKS in 1997 because a fundamental flaw he saw with microfinance—namely, its inability to scale to large numbers. Vikram is also the founder of SKS Foundation which is a US based non profit organization that supports the Ultra Poor Program, a program that attacks the challenge of extreme poverty on three levels: economic, social and health, and aims to graduate clients into being able to run a sustainable income-generating enterprise—and potentially into mainstream microfinance. A former management consultant with McKinsey & Company, Vikram holds a B.A. from Tufts, an M.A. from Yale, a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and was a Fulbright Scholar. He has received several awards, including the Schwab Social Entrepreneur of the Year (India), the Ernst & Young Start Up Entrepreneur of the Year (India) and he has been profiled in media ranging from CNN to front page of the Wall Street Journal.  In 2006, Vikram was named by TIME Magazine as one of the world’s 100 most influential people.