Do you really want *me* managing finances anymore at Kiva?  Come on now!  Help me by finding someone to apply for this job.

Description

Position: Finance Director/CFO
Location: San Francisco, CA – Downtown/Mission District
Job Type: Full time with competitive salary plus benefits.
Contact: jobs@kiva.org

Do you have a strong financial background and the ability to assess new revenue opportunities? Kiva.org is a nonprofit organization that lets people connect with and loan money to unique small businesses in the developing world. To date, our lenders have sent over $8M to entrepreneurs in the developing world at the rate of over $1M per month.

Called by many news publications as "revolutionizing how donors and lenders in the US are connecting with small entrepreneurs in developing countries" and "Kiva simply democratizes access to a worldwide microfinance movement that has been empowering the working poor for two decades", Kiva.org is changing the microfinance landscape.

Finance Director/CFO

* Role title will be determined by candidate's background and skill set

Job Responsibilities:

* Prepare revenue forecasts, monthly management reports, budget, and board reports
* Strategize and forecast future earned revenue streams for the organization
* Create and keep updated Kiva's internal control documents
* Author and implement next generation billing policies with microfinance institution partners
* Perform daily reconciliations of our database and payment systems
* Manage Kiva's accounts receivable and accounts payable through Quickbooks
* Perform partner payments and manage our partner aging reports
* Liaison with Kiva's external accountant teams to facilitate audits and tax reports
* Work with our product and engineering team to develop future accounting features

Experience Required/Preferred:

* Background in microfinance
* Thorough knowledge of Quickbooks
* 3-5 years direct finance experienc
* Background in management consulting or banking preferred
* BA/BS degree required, CPA/CFA preferred

Throughout the year, Kiva has been making a push to sign up more established, pre-vetted microfinance institutions (MFI) partners to the site. This is in an effort to more safely place the growing amount of funds that our lenders are making available to the entrepreneurs that get posted to the site by these field partners. The amounts being loaned on the site are staggering and we feel a growing responsibility at Kiva to manage and reduce the risk exposure to our lenders. There is a paradox, however, in doing so. Usually, the organizations that are the most transparent and credit worthy are least in need of the funding. Kiva hopes to address this paradox by using the Internet as a reputation building mechanism.

I recently wrote a paper that will come out this week in the academic journal Innovations. Below, I'm pasting in a snippet from the paper which really describes what we are seeing and how we are using the Internet to access a new class of MFIs.

In the past few years, we have seen the formation and growth of a new group of funds that seeks to link the microfinance industry to the capital markets.These funds feed a substantial and growing desire among institutional and individual high-net-worth lenders to invest in microfinance in developing countries. These funds also value both social and financial return and are usually rather risk averse. This is a fantastic trend that will no doubt contribute to the rapid increase of borowers served.

Because these funds need to provide commercial returns,they are typically targeted towards the best of the “Tier 1”MFIs. Tier 1 MFIs, the largest and most established, account for just 200 of the approximately 10,000 MFIs in existence. Lists of these MFIs and their terms for accepting debt are widely available. They attract international debt because they have reached a substantial size, are well run, and can prove it through transparent financial statements.

While the number of Tier 1 MFIs is growing rather slowly, the number of investment funds is growing incredibly fast. Thus,we are beginning to see a fairly crowded situation where a growing set offunds is targeting a relatively small group of institutions. I would argue that the amount of capital available to the MFIs in this group, even if they increase beyond the current 200,will out- pace their capacity and numbers,leading to a significant bottleneck in supply. It’s natural to ask, then, why don’t we invest in the other 9,800 MFIs? The short, over- simplified answer is a lack of tranparency and commercial viability. Many of the 9,800 MFIs are extremely small, opaque, unsustainable,and often impossible to contact internationally. We call this the “long tail”of MFIs.

Since these MFIs are off the commercial radar screen, they often have trouble accessing favorable debt and building up a level of creditworthiness. But Kiva’s partnership strategy includes openness to connecting with the long tail of MFIs. We view our ideal portfolio to be a combination of very established and more commercial MFIs and less established MFIs. Our ability to take risks and dip into the long tail is what differentiates us from the microfinance investment funds.We are able to do so for two reasons:

1) We have a risk-tolerant source of funds.
Individual Internet users lending small amounts at a time have a greater appetite for risk than commercial institutions or wealthy individuals using microfinance as part of their retirement account. I would argue that this group represents a huge, sustainable, and grow- ing constituency that is not artificially subsidizing our partner MFIs in unsustain- able ways.

2) We use the Internet as a reputation-building mechanism.
Through Kiva, MFIs build a track record for borrowing and paying back in real time.Users can moni- tor the performance of each MFI and the borrowers associated with it. Thus, we are giving organizations the ability to prove themselves through performance in a similar fashion to how Ebay allowed lesser known individuals and businesses to become major e-commerce players through credibility scores.
 
Since its inception as a movement in the 1970s, microfinance has been largely about providing financial services to those outside the banking system. MFIs often provide loans to people who have no collateral, and no previous credit history or formal, traceable identity. They are able to do this because they use reputational collateral and a hope for future access to funds in order to enforce repayment. MFIs have achieved very promising results through this approach. Kiva, in many ways, is conducting a similar experiment in our relationships with MFIs. We are reaching down into the long tail of MFIs, giving them the ability to prove themselves as good borrowers on the Internet,put their reputation on the line,and gain the ability to access future debt.

In our first year, we started reaching out to Tier 2-4 MFIs, and they started reaching out to us.Building a partner base was slow at first.It took three months after the DailyKos event to get our first set ofMFI partners on the site.  By the fall, we had around twenty. As of April 2007, we have nearly forty. A handful of our partners are commercially viable and able to attract true investment capital. The majority,however,are not top tier. Thus,the Kiva website is providing them with a platform to demonstrate a track record of borrowing that may one day lead to their inclusion in the capital markets.