MasterCard Program with Singapore University Focuses on Financial Inclusion, Innovation (Sept. 23, 2015)
MasterCard and Singapore Management University (SMU) today announced a two-year program to drive research on social entrepreneurship, innovation and financial inclusion. The Social and Financial Inclusion Program features an annual forum, a seminar series and funding toward student projects.
The program also establishes the MasterCard Professorship of Social Entrepreneurship and Financial Inclusion, in which a designated SMU faculty member will provide academic leadership for the program with professors from SMU’s academic strategy and management education unit and the Lee Kong Chian School of Business. SMU students will be able to tap MasterCard funding and support for their projects.
The program focuses on the Southeast Asia and South Asia regions, and research will be concentrated on identifying scalable and sustainable social entrepreneurship and innovative business models; advancing financial inclusion for marginalized communities and micro-entrepreneurs; developing innovative financial products and services for underserved populations; and studying the roles of public-private partnership and philanthropy, the macroeconomic impacts of financial and social inclusion, and the policy and regulatory environments that enable financial inclusion.
Research results will be presented at an annual MasterCard-SMU forum on social inclusion and economic value creation, the first of which will be held in mid-2016. A seminar series will offer advanced training on social and financial inclusion best practices for senior government officials, central bankers, regulators and senior business executives in the Asia-Pacific region.
The program is the latest collaboration between MasterCard and SMU. Over the past five years, MasterCard has supported 13 postgraduate students in the SMU MBA program as part of the MasterCard MBA Scholarships for Women.
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