The Crowdfunding Revolution: How to Raise Venture Capital Using Social Media

Chapter | 6BENEFITS

What we gave, we have;What we spent, we had;What we left, we lost.

–Tryon Edwards¹

In America alone, some 60 million people were considered among the “underbanked” in 2009, according to a Center for Financial Services Innovation (CFSI) study² based on Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) data. Underbanked consumers are those individuals who, while possibly having checking or savings accounts, also rely on alternative financial services such as money orders, check cashing, payday loans, and pawnshops. Even blindly applying the same metrics at the global scale would leave us to believe that well over 1 billion people in the world fall into this category.

But really, that is just a fraction of the population who have ...