Camino financial3/3/2023 Smeby comes to Camino to further build the best technology in finance by working with talented agile engineering teams. Camino’s cloud native platforms will serve marketing, operations, AI scoring models, and member services. Today we reached a momentous milestone, yet we still have a long “camino” ahead of us.Camino Financial recently announced that Eric Smeby has been hired as its Vice President of Engineering. So if you or anyone you know is interested to learn more about Camino, send us a message. We’re actively seeking to work with community partners such as banks, corporations, government entities, and non-profit organizations with an aligned mission to scale their impact in business communities of color. As the first CDFI powered by AI, Camino Financial plans to scale these partnerships to new levels. CDFIs are inherently financial inclusion platforms. We plan to combine the infinite scale of our AI-powered machine learning and data aggregation models, with the lower-cost capital and resources available to CDFIs, to drastically lower systemic costs and increase accessibility to capital among Latino and other underserved business segments.ĬDFIs are inherently a community partner and not a challenger to banks or other traditional financial institutions, giving them the flexibility to leverage the scale and infrastructure of partners to drive long-term change for communities often overlooked. The larger scale of FinTech lenders was also apparent in PPP lending, where participating FinTech lenders moved on average 52x more unique loan volume and 23x more loan origination dollars than CDFIs.Īs a neo-CDFI, we see the value in bridging the gap in capabilities between FinTechs and CDFIs. Using loan size as a proxy for inclusivity of capital, 76% of FinTech PPP loans were below $22,880, compared to 52% of CDFI PPP loans were below the same loan size. While it is clear CDFIs are a critical solution to finance underserved businesses, recent research reported by NYU Stern suggests FinTech lenders played a larger role in helping minority-owned businesses access PPP funding in 2020. The Biden administration, banks, and corporations have committed over $40 billion in capital to CDFIs and Minority Depository Institutions (“MDIs”) in the form of grants and low cost debt. While CDFIs and community lenders have existed for decades, now more than ever, CDFIs are well positioned to augment their impact thanks to the unprecedented capital commitments by public and private sectors. We saw this dynamic further amplified during COVID-19 when CDFIs disproportionately helped these business communities access PPP and other forms of relief. We’ve always had an unrelenting view that CDFIs play a critical role in narrowing the capital disparity gap experienced among minority business owners. In particular, we want to thank the current and former members of our Impact Advisory Board who played a crucial role in becoming a CDFI and representing our commitment to stay accountable to our mission of expanding affordable capital and financial literacy to underbanked Latinx businesses. We want to personally thank everyone reading this community letter as you have directly or indirectly contributed to the success of this journey. This announcement culminates a three year journey in becoming a CDFI. We are the first national CDFI powered by artificial intelligence, coined as a “neo-CDFI,” focused on lending to underbanked businesses. Today we’re proud to announce that Camino Financial was certified as a national Community Development Financial Institution (“CDFI”) by the U.S. Since founding Camino Financial, we finally found a word that sums up our mission, unique capabilities, and broader vision: neo-CDFI.Ĭlick here for launch video and here for press release.
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