Supporting strategies that provide Americans access to the financial products and educational tools they need to change their lives.

The Financial Capability Innovation Fund, managed by the Center for Financial Services Innovation (CFSI), supports promising nonprofit-led projects designed to help consumers better manage their finances and achieve financial prosperity. Specifically, the Fund focuses on projects that spur positive behavior changes and measurable outcomes for lower-income, underserved consumers. Examples of these results are: improved credit scores, increased savings, or avoidance of unnecessary transaction fees.

Through a competitive request for proposals process, CFSI recently selected five cutting-edge projects to receive $1.5 million total in grant support. These projects promote financial capability by leveraging technology, applying behavioral economics concepts, and closely combining relevant, timely, actionable, and ongoing strategies with access to high-quality financial products and services.

The grantees of the Financial Capability Innovation Fund are:

• Consumer Credit Counseling Service of Delaware Valley will test whether social commitments and text alerts can help consumers reduce debt.
• Co-opportunity, Inc. will leverage technology via a new online platform to enhance the effectiveness and scale of its volunteer budget coaching program.
• Filene Research Institute will test whether rewarding consistent timely loan payments with interest rate reductions leads to better payment behavior.
• Piggymojo will use goal visualization, social dynamics and mobile technology to help low-income savers turn impulse buys into impulse saves.
• Mission Asset Fund will franchise its Cestas Populares program, a peer loan coupled with product-specific peer-led education, to help immigrants build credit and manage credit wisely.

CFSI selected these five projects from among 246 applications totaling more than $67 million in requests. Organizations from more than 44 states responded to the request for proposals that CFSI released in September 2010.

CFSI is serious about program evaluation and ensuring that the Financial Capability Innovation Fund contributes to building a knowledge base about what works to promote financial capability. Toward that end, nationally-renowned researchers will evaluate each of these innovative programs to see what really works to promote financial capability. The research partners include the following organizations: Innovations for Poverty Action (Yale University); the Center for Financial Security (University of Wisconsin-Madison); the Center for Community Capital (University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill); and the César E. Chávez Institute (San Francisco State University).

CFSI will also provide several forms of non-financial support to ensure the success of the selected projects including strategic advice and guidance, technical assistance, visibility, peer-learning opportunities such as our Financial Capability Innovators Development Lab, and an unparalleled network in the financial services industry.

The Financial Capability Innovation Fund is generously supported by:

Led by:

and also by:

For more information about the Financial Capability Innovation Fund, please contact Sarah Gordon, Senior Relationship Manager, sgordon@cfsinnovation.com. For more information about Financial Capability click here