Hi. This is Paul Doleser, and welcome to the Awarepreneurs podcast. On this show, we dive deep into wisdom from some of the world's leading social entrepreneurs. Our goal is to help increase your positive impact, your profitability, and your quality of life. Before we get into today's topic, I have one request. If you could hit subscribe and do a review on your favorite podcast app, it helps more people learn how to have positive impact through a values based business. Thank you. Today, I am thrilled to introduce you to Rodney Williams, and our topic is effective financial inclusion.

Rodney is the cofounder and president of Solo Funds, a financial services company enabling community banking and lending solutions for everyday Americans. 82% of their members live in underserved ZIP codes. Rodney Williams, welcome to the Awarepreneur show.

Thank you. Thank you for having me. It's a absolute pleasure.

It's an honor to have you here. And before we get into this topic of effective financial inclusion, Rodney, what would somebody wanna know that goes, like, a little bit beyond the great intro? Okay. Yeah. You sound awesome in the, like, polished bio version. But what would somebody wanna know about your background, about why you're passionate about financial inclusion?

My background? Well, I'm originally from Baltimore. Where I grew up, my parents were originally from Jamaica. So I'm Caribbean. My family lived a ton or I think they had a ton of jobs, as you can imagine sometimes. We're a working class group. And, I think, honestly, some of the experiences that I saw growing up as a child were really important to to to my thoughts around financial inclusion, my thoughts on, you know, why I went to college and completed 4 degrees or, you know, even before I started this company, I started many companies. I think my entire life has been trying to address some of the financial things that I may have missed, in my in my childhood. Yeah.

And and one of the things, pitch and one of the things we talked about before I hit record is you're really zeroing in on helping people who are living paycheck to paycheck. And talk to us in 2024. Like, it seems like that's a growing segment of the population. Is that fair to say?

It's the vast majority of the population. And and I think that's probably you know, if you look at the US population of, some somewhere between 3 to 400,000,000, it's over 200,000,000 that are currently living paycheck to paycheck. So it's the vast majority of Americans have very, very limited savings or, you know, their savings isn't substantial to cover their experiences for any prolonged time period. That is the standard, and that is the current.

The 200,000,000, last I heard were, like, 330, 340,000,000 people. So we're talking about almost 2 thirds of the population. Let's call it 60% of the population. And and, again, before we get into the specifics of what you're doing, Rodney, you've been in the impact space for a while. And often when I hear financial and impact in the same sentence, I see 2 main things, and this is not on most people's radar in the impact space, the issue you're talking about. 1, either how do we invest for retirement? How do we invest surplus? And one of the things I hear you saying is more than 2 thirds of the population or 60% of the doesn't have any surplus. Or people are talking about impact investing. If you have a lot of surplus, how can you have positive impact with that? Now those are still important issues, but is it fair to say that sometimes those issues get a little more airtime than the issues that we're talking about right now?

11000%. To be honest, there's not enough attention to the correct issue or the correct problem. It's there's a lot of misrepresentation of what that problem may be, and I'm I'm hoping to provide some clarity. Yeah. Great.