How AI Can Drive Human-Centered Systems Change In Finance, With Mercedes Bidart

One Humanity Lab: Into an Ecology of Wholeness | Merceders Bidar | Human-Centered Systems Change

 

This episode of the One Humanity Lab Podcast is for leaders, coaches, and changemakers who care about economic justice, systems change, and the power of deep listening. Guest hosts Mia Cellucci and Pauline de Castelnau welcome Mercedes Bidart, CEO and Co‑founder of Quipu, a social enterprise using AI and alternative data models to provide equitable credit access for micro‑entrepreneurs in Latin America.

Drawing from her journey running community development projects in informal settlements in Argentina, earning a Masters in City Planning at MIT, and moving to Colombia, Mercedes shares how Quipu has supported tens of thousands of micro‑businesses that have been structurally excluded from traditional banking. She invites listeners into the story of pivoting from the idea of creating a local currency to real‑world access to fair credit, and how falling in love with the problem her team is solving—not their original idea of what a solution might look like—can unlock human‑centered innovation.

Together, they explore leadership, risk‑taking, and “playing” with ideas while staying grounded in what communities actually need. The conversation offers both practical insight into inclusive fintech and deeper reflections on leading system change from a place of courage, humility, and service.

This episode features:

Resources & Links:

Mia Cellucci and Pauline de Castelnau are Executive Coaches, alumni of the One Humanity Leadership Coaching Program, and Founding Fellows of the One Humanity Lab at the George Washington University Center for Excellence in Public Leadership.

Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, & share!

https://leadershipcoaching.cepl.gwu.edu/podcast/

—

Listen to the podcast here

 

How AI Can Drive Human-Centered Systems Change In Finance, With Mercedes Bidart

We are so excited to be guest hosts for season three of the show.

In this episode, we are very happy and honored to welcome our guest, Mercedes Bidar. Mercedes is the CEO and co-founder of Quipu, a financing platform for informal businesses in Latin America. For now, maybe it will expand elsewhere in the future. Quipu is building an equitable AI credit score for micro businesses.

Mercedes studied political science in Argentina, a country where she is from, and started her career supporting local governments in Latin America. She founded Quipu while completing her master’s degree at MIT in Boston. Since 2021, Quipu has supported more than 40,000 micro businesses. Mercedes is a Fellow of the Cartier Women’s Initiative 2024 and the Global Good Fund.

She has been recognized for a mighty tech review as an innovator under 35 in LATAM. Quipu was recognized by FAST Company as one of the ten most innovative companies in LATAM in 2022 and by Action Center for Financial Inclusion as one of the 50 most inclusive fintechs in the world. Again, we are very happy to have you, Mercedes. Welcome to the show.

Thank you. I am really happy to be here. Thank you for reaching out and for inviting me to this space.

Bridging The Information Gap: Financing Latin America’s Micro-Businesses

It is so great to be here with you. We are really excited to have you here to learn more about your work. To start us off, can you tell us in very simple terms what your team is doing right now at Quipu?

One Humanity Lab: Into an Ecology of Wholeness | Merceders Bidar | Human-Centered Systems Change
Human-Centered Systems Change: Many people are overlooked by traditional banking systems—we bridge that gap to bring them financial access.

 

Maybe I can start by explaining the problem. We are solving in Latin America, 9 out of 10 are micro businesses. They are the engine of our economy. They are one-third of our GDP, but still, they are not served with financial services. They might have a bank account or they might have a wallet in which they get payments, but still, they cannot access lending products or insurance products.

This is because there is not enough information about how they behave in their everyday life, in their business, or at work. At Quipu, we are solving the problem of bridging the gap of information to serve with financial products, micro businesses, independent workers, and people who are in a way not being seen by the traditional banking system. We have done that by the E-OLP scourings that look at non-traditional data like videos and social media.

How they are using their phone, how they are transacting in their digital wallets. By bringing all this information together, we are able to approve a loan in seconds and to give working capital to these types of businesses and people that are left out of what a loan can give you, which is usually growing your business. That is what we are doing and where we are focused on the problem of information, data, and financing.

As you answer that, I hear you are bringing in and connecting people who have been structurally excluded from traditional banking, who are entrepreneurs. You are bringing them in, and you are connecting them with resources. Here at the One Humanity Lab, we are really interested in increasing connection and in listening to and addressing a problem or something that needs to be more connected in a community. Can you tell us about how you discovered this as a community-based need, and how you started out to address it?

From Local Currencies To Fiat Needs: The Quipu Pivot

Quipu was my master’s thesis. I did my master’s thesis around this topic because when I was in Argentina, I worked with a company or nonprofit called Techo. It is a nonprofit that is working with informal settlements. I was at the microfinance program every week to support women in informal neighborhoods with their businesses.

I had seen how they were missing resources and missing the real access to financial products or other services that were being offered in the formal city in a way. When I went to my masters that was in city planning, I focused on the informal economy specifically, and how we could serve the informal economy and support it to create wealth locally.

Usually, what you see in informal settlements or low-income communities is that the money comes in but goes out. It is like a bucket with a lot of holes where people work outside of the neighborhood, but then they also spend time outside of the neighborhood. It is very difficult to create wealth internally. Still in these neighborhoods, there are a lot of businesses happening.

 

In informal communities, money comes in but flows out just as fast—like a bucket full of holes.

 

My first question was, how can we build technology that can create wealth locally, supporting businesses in these territories to grow? One way, the first idea I had was how we can support these businesses to get their neighbors to buy from them? In that process of launching the first idea of Quipu, which was inspired by local currencies, I got into the world of local currencies and community currencies. I started learning about them.

There are more than 3,000 local currencies around the world where communities start their own way of transacting locally. I started to think, How can we bring these solutions into informal neighborhoods, support local trade and bartering in a way, and make the money stay in the territories?”

While doing so, I launched this platform. They were community marketplaces with local currency embedded. We launched this in several neighborhoods on the Caribbean coast in Colombia. This was part of my master’s thesis. It was research in a way, understanding, could people really benefit from having their own means of transaction when they do not have enough cash, but still, they can get services and products locally?

By doing so, we understood that there were many findings that we learned. At that point, we launched it in the middle of COVID. There were a lot of learnings also at that point. They needed fiat currency, not necessarily these new local currencies we were building, because their businesses at that point had the equipment, but were missing the supplies because of COVID.

In the marketplace we built, we were capturing a lot of data on how they were behaving in their everyday lives because we were getting pictures of their products, we were getting their localization, how much they were selling, how much they were selling to their neighbors, and how much they were selling to other people.

That is when we realized the real need was access to fiat currency to grow their business or restart it at that point. They were not getting financing from any microfinance institution. All of them were rejecting them. We were having some information that we could see with our own eyes, but we were also capturing it digitally. That is where we started seeing that there is information that you understand if you are on the ground, and then with the new technologies we are seeing in the world, we can try to find a way to use them in a good way.

The Meaning Of Quipu: Returning To The Roots Of Record-Keeping

I am just curious, Mercedes, to hear what Quipu means. How did you find the name?

Quipu was what the Incas used before they were conquered by the Spanish in Latin America. They were using this method to record their transactions, their stories, and their sensor data. They are taking notes, and we named it Quipu because it is coming back to the roots of transactions and record keeping.

I love hearing that.

It really underscores what you said earlier. This is very clearly something that was an idea that was born from deep listening. Really listening to the needs of a community, like you said, seeing things with your own eyes that are happening on the ground that are not being recorded, that are not being seen by these larger systems that these people are being excluded from. I hear this, “Let us take it back and let us build wealth within our community instead of being extracted from or being exploited.” It is a beautiful name and a beautiful process.

It is a process. I think there is no idea out in the world that has not gone through a process and an iteration. If we really want to serve who we want to serve. We need to understand what the need is in the end. Sometimes the real need is not the one that we thought it was. That is what happened to me in my process.

One Humanity Lab: Into an Ecology of Wholeness | Merceders Bidar | Human-Centered Systems Change
Human-Centered Systems Change: There is no idea in the world that didn’t go through a process of iteration if we really want to serve who we want to serve.

 

Could you tell us a bit more about that process? We can feel and hear between the lines how much resilience was needed from you and your team to arrive at this very successful, very exciting, very inspiring Quipu. Now we are talking in 2026, and it looks like Quipu is also featured as a model that could inspire other initiatives. Could you tell us a bit more about this iteration, going on the ground, pivoting, moving from your original idea that was the journey that brought you here?

Maybe the follow-up question that will launch us in the future is that you arrived in a situation where the system was not seeing a large part of the economy, and you created something to address that. I will be curious to know how you see your initiative, how Quipu’s impact is now affecting the system that you had to deal with in the beginning.

Cliche But True: Falling In Love With The Problem, Not The Idea

I will start with the process. I started Quipu at the university. Sometimes I was bringing my experience working on the ground with local governments, with microfinance. When we are in university and in academia, sometimes we are very idealistic in a way, or utopian in what we are reading or what we want to see in the world. People come from a need for system change. I was guided by how we can change the system as a whole.

If we want to change the system as a whole, we need to find other ways of transacting and other ways of building our economy. I was really keen on the solidarity economy. I started to learn a lot about it and got obsessed with local currencies and all these alternative ways of building local economies. I had this idea on one side of this is the world I want to see. On the other side, how can I build this scalable way?

As I was at MIT, this is a university where you start learning about technology, startups, and how you can scale something super fast. I combined both of them, and I said, “This is something that I think could work in informal settlements because I have seen the lack of fiat currency, and I think that a local currency could be a good way of transacting.”

What if we do it in a startup way, which is building technology that could be really scalable, and not just building a currency from a foundation that is in one neighborhood? In the end, when I went and tried to implement it, that was during my master’s. We started building some prototypes. The prototypes sometimes look good when you are not fully dedicated to that, and you are just doing it as a research project. Those prototypes look good. People were receiving us. They wanted something.

When we went there, and all the times we were trying to build and improve the product, we were seeing that people really wanted something in technology that helped with their businesses and their economy. It was not until I moved to Colombia in 2021. I finished my master’s, then I went to New York to work for a year for the mayor’s office. In 2021, I got funding from the IDB lab, and I decided to move to Colombia.

Actually, I decided in 2020, but COVID was in the middle, so I stayed for one more year, and I moved to Colombia in January 2021. It was at that point that I was on the ground. This was my plan A, plan B, plan C. I was not doing any other job. All my energy and my co-founder’s energy were put into this. We noticed it was not working. I moved to a new country because I am not from Colombia. I moved to a new city with my co-founders, who were not from this city either.

We faced that each day. What we were trying to do was literally not working, was not growing. We cannot find a monetization way to monetize the platform. For us, we were building a startup. We were not building an NGO, and people were not understanding the currency we were building. It was trying to impose on our way and our idea. It was not until I realized that, and I noticed that this could be amazing if it worked, and we had our own currencies.

In the end, people who are living in an emergency every day, it might not be a fit, and it is fine. What is it they need? Something they need, because their economy is not growing. By iterating and being there on the ground, we understood that what they really need is fiat currency. We saw with our own eyes how the predatory lenders were going to their houses and giving them a loan in seconds.

Still, these predatory lenders are violent, and they charge abusive interest rates. We saw there the opportunity of saying, “Let us help them to prove to a bank that they are creditworthy.” Even if they do not have a credit history, or even if they are blacklisted in any way. It is a journey of a lot of iteration learning, and it was a lot also with my team. A lot of things happened, and a lot of learning, and still it is a journey.

How do you pivot? How do you reconnect with your repeated self-reporting and serving? Is that the root motivation of what you are doing that allowed you to switch?

We were not in love. This is super true. I do not know how to say it in English, but how do you say it when something that everybody says is tresado in Spanish, when something is cliché? This might be a cliché because everybody says this. “Do not fall in love with your idea, fall in love with a problem.”

 

Don’t fall in love with your idea—fall in love with the problem.

 

It is like that for us. I was not in love with the idea, even though I wanted and loved local currencies. I was really motivated by serving the informal economy and serving informal settlements on how they could grow and support these families with their businesses. At that point, I understood that this might be beautiful, but it is not what people actually need.

The pivoting was coming from the experience. By doing it, by being there and releasing something and trying things, we noticed that the data captured was useful. That data capture was useful for lending, as it was actually what they needed at that point. It was really organic how we pivoted. It was not that we came back to university and saw it for another year. What is our next idea? No, it was coming from doing it in a way.

You are speaking to something that is what I find the most fascinating about the work that you are doing, which is that you are able to hold this balance between holding an idea and holding this openness to change. Holding an idea lightly without attachment to the final iteration of it or what it might look like.

For me, as someone who has been learning about your work, that sounds like the key to being able to see that the system is not working. There is something that I need to address. My team is working on it. I think a lot of leaders, and especially folks who come from this idealistic place, maybe come from university or from a place of looking at a problem from the outside.

A lot of people could just get stuck where you did not and say, “I came here, I went to Columbia, we tried the idea, it was not working. You kept going, and you kept listening and noticing.” I am wondering if that sounds like you are able to stay open, creative, and flexible. How do you cultivate those qualities and make sure to stay in that place of, “I am here, and I am dedicated, and I know what I am looking to solve and to serve without getting rigid?”

Disrupting The “Dinosaur” Institutions: Rewriting The Rules Of Risk

Thank you for all that you said. I do not know. It is just being very connected with a problem, obsessed with a problem, and open to what even the market is saying. This is really weird for me to say this because, right now, it is not because I turned out to be a businesswoman, but I was not, and I am coming from a place of deep theory and thinking.

In the end, by doing so, I understood what works in the practical world in a way, even though we want to change it. I found out that even the market was talking to us. It is not just the need of who we are serving and the market on what is possible from a market perspective, but also from a business perspective. That was another thing that we decided from the beginning. Since the beginning, we decided we wanted to do a social enterprise.

If I were going to do an NGO, then it might have been completely different because maybe you do not need the market to speak to you. You just need to find a need and find a solution. As I wanted to be self-sustaining and a social enterprise, I needed to understand the market. For me, that was a whole journey on, “Wait, even though I want to see this world happening, what is actually possible from the same idea and building?

Even now, we are in a way again listening to the market and understanding that. We started lending. We noticed that data was useful for assessing risk and lending. We tried to do it with a microfinance institution, being the one that put the data, and the financial institution, the one that put the money. As we were super, it was really at the beginning. Our scores were not actually working.

It was just some data points we were capturing. This MFI told us, “I still need my processes to approve or not.” They were taking a month to approve or reject a loan. It was not good for us in terms of how able. Involving the technology. We reached a point where the organization we were doing the pilot with rejected a person because of the type of business she was doing. This is funny, but it was a sex shop.

For me, it was, “Why are you rejecting this?” It is a wonderful story because this woman had cancer, and the sex shop was what brought her to her female power. It is a beautiful story. Still with her business. That business grew a lot. This microfinance institution said, “I want to reject this applicant.” We said, “Wait, we have all this information. We know that business is working, and she has a beautiful story. Let us support her.”

That was our first loan. We went to her house because she was selling from her home, and we gave her the first loan. It was $250. We said, “We need to be the ones giving the loans. We cannot wait for this MFI to decide because we are not trying the technology.” We started giving our own loans because of that. We grew our own lending operation. We already have already $8 million, and we train our models, our learning and our underwriting models, and our risk assessment models.

Now we reach a point where we say, “Wait, we can lend, but our mission is for money to flow into the hands of the informal economy. We can be the ones lending, or we can use our technology for others to lend. Now we came back to that first moment, but without a good product, and with wallets and other banks and other MFIs, microfinance institutions are using our technology to lend. It is not just us. You see how we are again listening to the market and understanding what the real theory of change is for us. It is not just a lender ourselves. It is changing the rules on lending. That is what we are building right now.

One Humanity Lab: Into an Ecology of Wholeness | Merceders Bidar | Human-Centered Systems Change
Human-Centered Systems Change: Our mission is to get money flowing into the informal economy and change the rules of lending.

 

It sounds like you have really been able to create this very place-based solution, but then, keep checking, is this going to scale? Is this something that could be adapted to another place? How can this work within the system that we are trying to change now, while holding this vision of a new system with a lot of flexibility? That is what I hear in your answer. It is a lot to hold at once. I hear a lot of movement, too. You are trying and iterating and trying and iterating and listening and noticing and trying again and almost like playing a bit, trying things out.

It is a little bit of play.

Seeing what works. Again, I hear this creativity, this flexibility, the playfulness, which are all qualities that are critical for leaders who are leading systems change.

Thank you.

I just love this story of the rejection that was very profitable for Quipu.

Now she has a store. You can imagine how she grew.

As you tell the story, you keep coming back to what is important. “We did this and that.” What is important is that the money flows back into the community to the people. It is flowing through the entrepreneurs and building wealth within the community. I hear this, “We tried this, and this, and we are back.

This is what is important. We came back here, and we tried something else, and we came back here.” I have heard that throughout just learning about your work. I am tempted to ask you a question about your vision for the future in a certain number of years, but so far, what I am hearing is “We know what is important and we are willing to play.” How do you hear that?

If I can tap into your question, Mia, and also keep focusing on one step further into your leadership, Mercedes, and what type of leader you are. I second Mia completely on the playing, coming back, playing, coming back. There is something you said in the decisive moment when this lady was being rejected by the formal banking system.

You said something like, “We have to go, we cannot wait.” We have to be the ones going, which is for me a very leadership reaction. Nobody is seeing where this could go, but we believe that there could be a way to achieve what we are trying to achieve here. If nobody is willing to go, we are going to be the ones going.

Do you have in your journey leadership figures that fueled this posture that you manifested in this moment? What was your drive? Maybe if we go back to this moment where you were like, “If no one is going to go, we are going to go. We are willing to support this business and be the one lending her the money directly.”

Social Entrepreneurship: The Drive To Change The System

It is a mix of self-confidence and risk-taking. It is the drive, it is just the soul. I cannot explain it. It is just being a doer. There is no other option, let us do this. I was able to take all the risks I took because there were a lot of risks that now that I am older, I am 33, but I am older than when I started. I did not measure all these risks. I was just like, I have nothing to lose. That was my way of thinking.

A lot of that was because of what I have seen growing up, and seeing that my parents are divorced, they have a business. They started that business completely different from what I do because they have a traditional business in Argentina. I have seen how that was their plan A, B, C. They did not finish University, they were not thinking of being employed. They were just driving the family business, selling and selling and selling. That was what they needed to do.

That way of growing up and just being surrounded by my dad and my mom, both of them, building this small or medium-sized business with all the crises they had to go through in Argentina, because it is a country that is all the time in economic crisis, finding their way in their journey, I think that is why I got this entrepreneurial spirit of just jumping and doing.

In my case, I would not be doing anything that is not related to social impact or something that, for me, makes sense in that what I am doing is trying to change the system somehow. I would not be doing it because I think I would not be good at anything else. I could be a good entrepreneur, but not an entrepreneur who is not driven by social impact.

I could see in my journey that of just doing and taking risks, and that self-confidence that my parents gave me of just saying, “You are able to do it, you can do it.” I had leaders, of course, whom I looked up to. I went to MIT because of Otto Scharmer. I read about him when I was in Argentina, and I saw how somebody could be talking about system change.

When I was applying to universities, I said, “If this guy is inside these universities, that’s where I need to be.” When I arrived at MIT, I was in the department of urban studies. He is not there. He is at Sloan, which is the business department. I look for his class, and I just subscribed, and I went to his class in my first semester, which is really weird because usually people go in their third semester to that class.

I arrived there, and I told him, “I came here because I want to work with you. I do not know how, but I want to work with you.” He gave me a hand. It is like our journey is usually surrounded by people who give us their hand. He even gave me a job, and I paid with that what I was missing of my tuition. It was huge for me. It is those types of people who can inspire us. Even if we are nobody because I did accomplish nothing at that point, he believed in me and helped me. We need those types of inspirations also.

 

Our journeys are shaped by people who lend a hand—we all need that kind of support.

 

There is a lot of trust on both of your sides. It sounds like you trust your felt sense of, “I am here, I want to work with you, I do not know how, but I am telling you this because I know it somehow and I trust that.” For him to receive, “I trust you. Both of you are putting into practice what Otto Scharmer teaches and writes about, leading from the emerging future.” That is what I hear in your stories, both of you trusting, “We do not know exactly what the future is going to look like, but we are stepping forward to it together and listening to it and leading from that place and doing from that place.

The Future Of Financial Inclusion: Real-Time Data And AI

That is a great cue to tie back to your question, Mia, by hijacking it, sorry. When you ask, “Mercedes, about what she sees, what do you see, Mercedes? What do you feel emerging in the future or in your sector, at least in the informal economy sector?”

After all this journey and getting to a point where we have a product on how to assess the risk of people that cannot be assessed in a traditional way, we reached a point where we understood that if we really want to change the system and allow them to have more access, then we need to rewrite the rules on underwriting, credit underwriting, and risk assessment.

We could scale even faster and have more impact if the traditional financial institutions used our way of assessing risk as if we were a credit bureau. We are seeing that is where we are heading, how we can build a credit bureau that says yes. That is how we talk about it. We think that right now, credit bureaus are in the business of saying no. They are using data from the past.

They are centralized, extremely centralized data. Right now, all of us have our data in our hands. If we are able to translate that data into financial decisions, then we can build better products and allow people to access better financial services. We want people to have more access, not banks to sell more. To do that, even if it is our loan or other lenders, we want to be the enablers of that translation of the data into risk assessment.

We can support people to access financial services from Quipo or from any other financial institution. That is where we see this financial inclusion world heading. We need to use data in real time. We need to use first-party data. We need to use the latest models in AI and machine learning. We need to change how we think about risk assessment and financial products.

It will take a while. It is not a transition that will happen fast, because these are dinosaurs. These institutions are very old and take a lot of time to change. There are people inside these institutions who are already seeing that this could be a future. Those are the people that we are talking to and helping them also change their ways of underwriting and financial problems.

There are these big dinosaur institutions, but you are not stopping. Again, I feel like a lot of entrepreneurs might stop there. There is this big dinosaur in the way, and I cannot get around it. I hear you saying, “No, but there are people inside.” There are these dinosaur institutions, but there are human beings inside that also may see what we see, which is that we need to rewrite the rules.

I love that. I want to come back to AI because we have been talking about keeping wealth within communities, building a model that is not extractive, that is not the predatory lenders, that is not taking from communities, but rather building and circulating wealth within communities and allowing people to build wealth.

I am curious to hear how you are thinking about AI as a tool, how you are using AI as a tool to make this data collection about entrepreneurs less extractive and more connecting and building. How are you keeping that at the center, where so much of AI tends to be extractive in terms of our personal data?

Hyper-Personalization: Using AI For Connection, Not Extraction

In the same way that Instagram uses our data to send us new advertisements all the time, and they know us, and they know what we want, because they hear us, and they get all our information. We are thinking about how we can use all your data, but not to offer you something for you to spend more, but actually to give you a service that is tailor-made for your needs. We call this a hyper-personalization of the loan offer.

When you go to a bank, they have several financial products. If you do not fit them, then you are rejected. What happens if we understand that if you are a bakery, it is different than if you have a beauty salon? You might need a different financial product, meaning installments, pricing, and amount.

If I really understand you and understand your business and where you are located and all your data, then I can immediately offer you a better financial product. You do not need to spend your time applying to each bank with each onboarding process and underwriting process, which takes a lot of time, and usually people just get whatever they get, and they do not compare with any other financial service.

We see that AI plays a role in the hyper-personalization of the loan offer and uses millions and millions of data points at the same time, that if you have a risk officer, that is usually how credit underwriting is being done. They could not process all these millions of data points at once. It might be a little bit subjective, the final decision. I see the power of technology there in real use cases, not just in building new agents. If we build agents, how do we build them to make life easier and give us more access rather than exclude us from roads?

You said hyper-personalization, and I also hear hyper-humanization, or making sure that we have these new technologies that are emerging, and they are changing rapidly, and they are everywhere, and everyone is trying to figure out how to use AI. Your team is saying, “How can we make sure to always use this as a tool to include, to humanize, to treat people with dignity, to give things back instead of taking away?” I find that so refreshing in this world. I just spoke to an AI robot on the phone when I was trying to look at a product. I find that very refreshing.

That is frustrating. People end up hating robots, like hating the customer support that is automated. We need more humanization at that point. We can combine it with AI in the places or points in our services that are beneficial for us. It is really frustrating to talk to a robot all the time.

It is a tool, and we decide how to use it. We need to put things in place to ensure that we are using it to serve our humanity and our connection to each other and to the planet, rather than letting it take on a life of its own and get caught up in it.

It is really a great testimony to the importance of the weight of the core mission in any initiative. You seem so engaged and clear on why you are doing all this, that AI is just to serve your mission. That is great. I am the timekeeper, and we are almost at the moment we need to wrap up. That is quite frustrating because I feel we could talk with you for hours, Mercedes. Maybe there will be another one in a few months about the next adventure of Quipu. As a wrap-up, what do you wish Quipu and your team for the future?

Educating The “Dinosaurs”: The Launch Of Escuela Quipu And MIT

Thank you. It’s more connections. We are looking for more people inside these dinosaurs, inside bonds, inside microfinance institutions, inside financial institutions that want to think differently. We want to build this network, people thinking differently. That is why I am getting involved in education, also. We are building a course with MIT.

Actually, Otto is coming. Catherine is coming to banking leaders on how to use AI in financial inclusion and rethink the rules. I learned that if we want to change it, then we also need to educate on what it means and what AI is, and what it means to build a different system. Those endeavors are also about bringing people into studying and thinking. That is where we are heading, like how we can build a different movement.

Thank you, Mercedes. This has been such a great conversation. I agree with Pauline. I could continue talking for an hour, but we do not have the time, unfortunately. We have to let you go. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us. Can you just tell us, as we wrap up, how our listeners can follow along with your work at Quipu? How can they find out about the new course you are working on when it is ready at MIT? What is the best way to do that?

On LinkedIn, I am Mercedes Bidart. Maybe you can put it in the description. On Instagram, I am also Mercedes Bidart. Quipu Latam, Instagram, and LinkedIn. The school we are building is May at MIT. It is called EscuelaQuipu.com, and there you can read about it. I will share with you the links and everything.

Is it like breaking news? Have you told anyone yet about Escuela Quipu?

We launched it a month ago.

You heard it here first. The first time I heard it.

No, amazing. Thank you for the space.

We will include all of those links so that our audiences can follow along with you and your work and all of the new and exciting things you are doing.

Thank you, Mia and Pauline.

As we close, Mercedes, what is one more word, just one word or one intention you would like to leave our audiences with?

Perseverance.

Yes, you embody that.

You do. It is a good summary of our conversation.

Thank you so much. Thank you, Mia, and thank you to all our audiences. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it, leave a review, or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. We hope you will join us for the next episode of the show. Thank you, and see you soon.

 

Important Links

 

About Mercedes Bidar

One Humanity Lab: Into an Ecology of Wholeness | Merceders Bidar | Human-Centered Systems ChangeMercedes Bidart is the CEO and Co-founder of Quipu, a financing platform for informal businesses in Latam, building an equitable AI credit score. Born and raised in Argentina, Mercedes studied Political Science at the University of Buenos Aires and worked at CIPPEC supporting local governments in Latin America and at TECHO in the micro-finance program. She then completed a master’s degree in Cities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on a Fulbright scholarship. At MIT, she founded Quipu after going through the MIT DesignX incubator. Since 2021, Mercedes has been based in Colombia, expanding Quipu’s solution to support more than 40,000 micro-businesses to date. Mercedes is a Fellow of the Cartier Women’s Initiative 2024 and The Global Good Fund. She has been recognized for MIT Tech Review as an Innovator Under 35 in Latam. She is also a research affiliate at the MIT Community Innovators Lab, and a Board member of MIT DesignX.

Quipu was recognized by Fast Company as one of the ten most innovative companies in LATAM in 2022 and by Accion’s Center for Financial Inclusion as one of the 50 most inclusive fintechs in the world.

 

 

Tagged , , , , ,

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *