Kiva.org
Kiva (commonly known by its domain name, Kiva.org) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, that claims to allow people to lend money via the Internet to low-income entrepreneurs and students in 77 countries. Kiva's mission is "to expand financial access to help underserved communities thrive." They have been accused of deceptive business practices, misleading donors into believing their funds would be used for specific individuals and misrepresenting other aspects of their operations. Kiva distributes funds that it receives to microfinance institutions, social impact businesses, schools or non-profit organizations and does not generally directly provide funds to specific individuals. These organizations are charged fees by Kiva and borrowers pay interest on most loans. Kiva is supported by grants, loans, and donations from its users, corporations, and national institutions. Since 2005, Kiva has Crowdfunding, crowd-funded more than 1.6 ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Premal Shah
Premal Shah is an Indian-American entrepreneur who co-founded Kiva, a global poverty alleviation non-profit that has raised over $1 billion for low-income entrepreneurs in eighty countries. Early life Shah was born in Ahmedabad, India, and raised in Minnesota, graduating from Irondale High School. He attended Stanford University, where he pursued his interest in economic development, with a specific focus on microfinance. At the London School of Economics he received a research grant to study the microfinance work of the Self-Employed Women's Association. Career Shah was an early employee of and principal product manager at PayPal. Building on his college interest in microfinance, Shah took a sabbatical from PayPal in 2004 to prototype a concept of person-to-person microlending in India. Upon his return to Silicon Valley in 2005, Shah joined Matt Flannery and Jessica Jackley in launching Kiva and scaling it into a global organization. Kiva has since raised over one bil ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Microfinance
Microfinance is a category of financial services targeting individuals and small businesses who lack access to conventional banking and related services. Microfinance includes microcredit, the provision of small loans to poor clients; savings and checking accounts; microinsurance; and payment systems, among other services. Microfinance services are designed to reach excluded customers, usually poorer population segments, possibly socially marginalized, or geographically more isolated, and to help them become self-sufficient.Christen, Robert Peck Christen; Rosenberg, Richard; Jayadeva, Veena. ''Financial institutions with a double-bottom line: Implications for the future of microfinance''. CGAP, Occasional Papers series, July 2004, pp. 2–3. ID Ghana is an example of a microfinance institution. Microfinance initially had a limited definition: the provision of microloans to poor entrepreneurs and small businesses lacking access to credit. The two main mechanisms for the delive ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Jessica Jackley
Jessica Erin Jackley (born October 29, 1977) is an American entrepreneur who co-founded Kiva and later ProFounder, two organizations that promote development through microloans. Early life Jackley grew up in Franklin Park, Pennsylvania. She graduated from North Allegheny Senior High School in 1996. She received her B.A. degree in philosophy and political science from Bucknell University in 2000 and an M.B.A. from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, with certificates in Public and Global Management. Career Jackley was the co-founder and CEO of ProFounder, a platform that provided tools for small business entrepreneurs in the United States to access start-up capital through crowdfunding and community involvement. Prior to ProFounder, Jackley was co-founder and chief marketing officer of Kiva, the world's first p2p microlending website. Jackley and Matt Flannery (now her ex-husband) founded Kiva Microfunds in October 2005. Jackley is a visiting scholar at Stanford Unive ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Microcredit
:''This article is specific to small loans, often provided in a pooled manner. For direct payments to individuals for specific projects, see Micropatronage. For financial services to the poor, see Microfinance. For small payments, see Micropayment.'' Microcredit is the extension of very small loans (microloans) to impoverished borrowers who typically lack collateral, steady employment, or a verifiable credit history. It is designed to support entrepreneurship and alleviate poverty. Many recipients are illiterate, and therefore unable to complete paperwork required to get conventional loans. As of 2009 an estimated 74 million people held microloans that totaled US$38 billion. Grameen Bank reports that repayment success rates are between 95 and 98 percent. Microcredit is part of microfinance, which provides a wider range of financial services, especially savings accounts, to the poor. Modern microcredit is generally considered to have originated with the Grameen Bank founded in Ba ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Kiva
A kiva is a space used by Puebloans for rites and political meetings, many of them associated with the kachina belief system. Among the modern Hopi and most other Pueblo peoples, "kiva" means a large room that is circular and underground, and used for spiritual ceremonies. Similar subterranean rooms are found among ruins in the North-American South-West, indicating uses by the ancient peoples of the region including the ancestral Puebloans, the Mogollon, and the Hohokam. Those used by the ancient Pueblos of the Pueblo I Period and following, designated by the Pecos Classification system developed by archaeologists, were usually round and evolved from simpler pit-houses. For the Ancestral Puebloans, these rooms are believed to have had a variety of functions, including domestic residence along with social and ceremonial purposes. Evolution During the late 8th century, Mesa Verdeans started building square pit structures that archeologists call protokivas. They were typ ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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PayPal
PayPal Holdings, Inc. is an American multinational financial technology company operating an online payments system in the majority of countries that support online money transfers, and serves as an electronic alternative to traditional paper methods such as checks and money orders. The company operates as a payment processor for online vendors, auction sites and many other commercial users, for which it charges a fee. Established in 1998 as Confinity, PayPal went public through an IPO in 2002. It became a wholly owned subsidiary of eBay later that year, valued at $1.5 billion. In 2015 eBay spun off PayPal to its shareholders, and PayPal became an independent company again. The company was ranked 143rd on the 2022 Fortune 500 of the largest United States corporations by revenue. History Early history PayPal was originally established by Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, and Luke Nosek in December 1998 as Confinity, a company that developed security software for hand-held de ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Revenue
In accounting, revenue is the total amount of income generated by the sale of goods and services related to the primary operations of the business. Commercial revenue may also be referred to as sales or as turnover. Some companies receive revenue from interest, royalties, or other fees A fee is the price one pays as remuneration for rights or services. Fees usually allow for overhead (business), overhead, wages, costs, and Profit (accounting), markup. Traditionally, professionals in the United Kingdom (and previously the Repu .... This definition is based on International Accounting Standard, IAS 18. "Revenue" may refer to income in general, or it may refer to the amount, in a monetary unit, earned during a period of time, as in "Last year, Company X had revenue of $42 million". Profit (accounting), Profits or net income generally imply total revenue minus total expenses in a given period. In accountancy, accounting, in the balance statement, revenue is a subsection of the ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Chevron Corporation
Chevron Corporation is an American multinational energy corporation. The second-largest direct descendant of Standard Oil, and originally known as the Standard Oil Company of California (shortened to Socal or CalSo), it is headquartered in San Ramon, California, and active in more than 180 countries. Chevron is engaged in every aspect of the oil and natural gas industries, including hydrocarbon exploration and production; refining, marketing and transport; chemicals manufacturing and sales; and power generation. Chevron traces its history back to the 1870s. The company grew quickly after the breakup of Standard Oil by acquiring companies and partnering with others, especially Texaco. Socal was one of the Seven Sisters that dominated the global petroleum industry from the mid-1940s to the 1970s. In 1985, Socal merged with the Pittsburgh-based Gulf Oil and rebranded as Chevron; the newly-merged company later merged with Texaco in 2001. Today, Chevron manufactures and sells fu ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Visa Inc
Visa Inc. (; stylized as ''VISA'') is an American multinational financial services corporation headquartered in San Francisco, California. It facilitates electronic funds transfers throughout the world, most commonly through Visa-branded credit cards, debit cards and prepaid cards. Visa is one of the world's most valuable companies. Visa does not issue cards, extend credit or set rates and fees for consumers; rather, Visa provides financial institutions with Visa-branded payment products that they then use to offer credit, debit, prepaid and cash access programs to their customers. In 2015, the Nilson Report, a publication that tracks the credit card industry, found that Visa's global network (known as VisaNet) processed 100 billion transactions during 2014 with a total volume of US$6.8 trillion. This article is authored by a ''Forbes'' staff member. Visa was founded in 1958 by Bank of America (BofA) as the BankAmericard credit card program. Available through ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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American Express
American Express Company (Amex) is an American multinational corporation specialized in payment card services headquartered at 200 Vesey Street in the Battery Park City neighborhood of Lower Manhattan in New York City. The company was founded in 1850 and is one of the 30 components of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The company's logo, adopted in 1958, is a gladiator or centurion whose image appears on the company's well-known traveler's cheques, charge cards, and credit cards. During the 1980s, Amex invested in the brokerage industry, acquiring what became, in increments, Shearson Lehman Hutton and then divesting these into what became Smith Barney Shearson (owned by Primerica) and a revived Lehman Brothers. By 2008 neither the Shearson nor the Lehman name existed. In 2016, credit cards using the American Express network accounted for 22.9% of the total dollar volume of credit card transactions in the United States. , the company had 121.7million cards in force, includ ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Skoll Foundation
The Skoll Foundation is a private foundation based in Palo Alto, California. The foundation makes grants and investments intended to reduce global poverty. Jeffrey Skoll created the foundation in 1999. The total assets of the foundation (including its affiliated funds) are $1.127 billion as of the end of 2018. The combined entities made grants totaling about $71 million in 2018 (and disbursements of $56M), based on unaudited numbers reported by the foundation. According to the most recent audited financial statements, the non-grant expenses for the foundation totaled around $17M in 2018. History Skoll set up the foundation in 1999 to fund social entrepreneurship through awards, grants and educational programs at Oxford and Harvard Universities. In late 2003, Skoll established the private Skoll Foundation. The two entities, which have distinct governing bodies but share staff and offices, together operate the foundation's grantmaking and other programs. In 2001, Skoll hired Sal ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Sam's Club
Sam's West, Inc. (doing business as Sam's Club) is an American chain of membership-only retail warehouse clubs owned and operated by Walmart Inc., founded in 1983 and named after Walmart founder Sam Walton as Sam’s Wholesale Club. , Sam's Club ranks second in sales volume among warehouse clubs with $57.839 billion in sales (in fiscal year 2019) behind rival Costco Wholesale. , Sam's Club operates 600 membership warehouse clubs in the United States in 44 states, Puerto Rico and the U.S Virgin Islands. The only states where Sam's Club does not operate are Alaska (all three locations in that state closed in 2018 as part of a plan to close 63 clubs), Massachusetts (its last remaining location in that state, located in Worcester, closed in 2018 as part of a plan to close 63 clubs), Oregon, Rhode Island (the state's only location, in Warwick, closed in 2016 as part of a plan to close 269 stores globally, including four U.S. clubs), Vermont, and Washington (all three locations in ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |