We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Marvin Francois. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Marvin below.

Marvin, appreciate you joining us today. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?

We believe communities flourish when small businesses flourish. Further, we see entrepreneurship as the great equalizer helping to significantly narrow (and ultimately zero) the wealth gap. For context, Black business owners have a median net worth 12x that of Black non-business owners. Further, the racial wealth gap between White and Black business owners narrows to 3x, as compared to 13x times amongst the general White and Black populations. Similar trends are observed across other underrepresented groups. Beyond personal wealth-building, each dollar invested in small businesses returns $0.40 to local communities, and it is well-reported that small businesses have contributed 55% of the total net job creation over the last decade. We imagine a world where small businesses will increasingly become local job-creating engines and economic spigots. This will ultimately lead to widespread socioeconomic shifts in historically disinvested neighborhoods and communities. This is why, as a fintech company, we are committed to providing modernized, cutting-edge financial products that not only democratize access to capital, but accelerate financial inclusion for underfunded, underbanked and credit-starved businesses.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

oneKIN is a fintech company driving growth for early-stage companies and small businesses through smart, data-driven financial solutions. We are singularly focused on addressing the biggest impediment to small business success: capital access.
Founders and small businesses are underfunded and underbanked resulting in billions of dollars of lost economic potential. The underlying challenges are systemic. Despite, the enormity and profitability of the financial services industry, it fails to innovate beyond the existing outmoded, cookie-cutter solutions.
I’ve sat on multiple sides of this issue: as a child watching his grandmother make multiple attempts at building a business to support her family, and as a Wall Street banker intimately acquainted with financial engineering. Through my experiences, I have come to understand that the problem of financial exclusion – particularly as it relates to small businesses – is not a product of organic market forces, but an orchestrated and intentional design.

An alternative funding solution, our latest product – the founders’ pool™ – is a first-of-its-kind, founder-to-founder collaborative finance platform where founders and small businesses pool together their resources to fund each other’s projects. Inspired by community finance models in developing nations, we are building a neobank and reciprocal financial ecosystem, where founders are substantially funded by other founders. Our solution takes shape across four strategic, data-guided phases, and includes our proprietary underwriting model based on non-traditional, but determinant, credit factors.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

Whether directly or indirectly, throughout our early development we learn to distrust or suppress our intuition. This was particularly true for me operating in a quantitative environment. However, as a founder, I have increasingly learned to trust (and am desperately reliant on) my intuition.

Contrary to popular belief, intuition is rooted in real science. It is not pseudo-science; it is biological. At any given moment, your subconscious is processing many channels of information, making connections, and arriving at “data-informed” conclusions before you are consciously aware. More than an impulse, that “gut feeling” or intuition is the infrequent moments when our subconscious mind grants our conscious mind access. Coupled with critical thinking, intuition can lead to better decision-making and outcomes.

Any advice for managing a team?

1. I encourage ideas and creativity from every corner of the business, and foster a culture of receptivity to ideas. There is no shortage of good ideas, only lack of receptivity to ideas.

2. In a culture that celebrates ideas from all corners, it’s equally important that we encourage constant experimentation. Contrary to popular belief, some of the world’s most revolutionary innovations were born out of unapologetic experimentation.

3. Creativity requires autonomy. We often assign projects with little prescription. We want to give everyone an opportunity to rise to the occasion, take ownership of the business, and do their best work.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.onekin.co/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/_onekin/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/m-francois-cfa-305/