Location: Hyderabad, India Industry: Financial Services 2007 Sales: NA
Grameen Bank, the organization founded by Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, may be the best-known practitioner of microfinance, which provides small loans and other financial services to the poor. But advisory board member Tarun Khanna, a professor at Harvard Business School, believes Hyderabad, India-based SKS Microfinance (privcapId=26522095) could have even more impact. (Khanna is on the board of the organization.) For one, it’s “unabashedly for profit,” Khanna says, which means it’s growing fast and plowing those profits back into building new systems and greater scale. Already, SKS has 14,000 employees and 3.5 million customers throughout India, and is adding 300,000 new customers each month.
