Can AI uplift entrepreneurs that traditional banks reject? | Mercedes Bidart
Impact entrepreneur Mercedes Bidart explains how informal entrepreneurs across Latin America are highly trusted within their communities yet are excluded from formal banking because they lack conventional financial records. She describes an AI-driven approach that transforms alternative data from phones, telecom records, videos, and social media into financial identities and risk scores, enabling micro-business owners to access fair, tailored credit instead of relying on violent, predatory lenders. Over three years, these models have reached market-level accuracy and helped tens of thousands of entrepreneurs gain access to formal loans, illustrating how AI can make finance more inclusive when designed intentionally.
In Gaza, money is falling apart
Planet Money follows two best friends from Gaza, Alaldeen Sheikh Khalid in Belgium and Mohamed Awad still in Gaza, as they piece together an improvised financial pipeline to move usable Israeli shekels into Gaza despite a blockade on cash and a barely functioning banking and internet infrastructure. Through their project Impossible Light and the story of a young woman named Haya living in a tent camp, the episode shows how extreme cash shortages, destroyed infrastructure, and war-driven scarcity have turned money itself into a scarce and damaged commodity, inflating prices and spawning a market where people literally "buy money with money" just to obtain physical cash. The episode details how this system works in practice, from international donors to Palestinian bank accounts to cash brokers and cash repairers, and what that means for ordinary Gazans trying to secure basics like food, tents, diapers, and milk.