Purpose banking for startups: How to incorporate your values into your finances?
Summary
A large focus has been placed on the role of banks, whose power is derived from the vast concentration of capital they oversee. What started as a facilitator for the development of societies and economies, has become a money machine driven by short term gains and profit maximization at all costs. This image has been been further accentuated by the popularization of cultural and cinematic figures like ‘Gordon Gekko’ (the central character in the film Wall Street) or Jordan Belfort (real-life author, speaker, former stockbroker and convicted felon, who was the basis for the film The Wolf of Wall Street), who come to symbolize all that is wrong with the global financial system. Bangladeshi entrepreneur and Nobel laureate Muhammed Yunus started questioning and using money in a totally different way to actually take people, and especially women, out of poverty – instead of making them hostages of the system. In the decades that followed, various successful initiatives started popping up around the world and we see that in some countries a strong cooperative banking system remains.