Dr. Vikram Akula

Vikram Akula is the Founder and Chairperson of SKS Microfinance, an organization whose mission is to eradicate poverty by providing financial services to poor households. He was named by TIME Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2006 and SKS Microfinance, was named one of Businessweek's Top 5 Companies to watch in 2009.

Vikram launched SKS in 1998 because a fundamental flaw he saw with microfinance—namely, its inability to scale. He developed a commercial model of microfinance that would overcome the challenges to scaling and, as a result, SKS has been able to scale in an unprecedented manner—having provided micro-insurance products and over $1.4 billion in micro-credit to 4.2 million poor women and their families spread across 80,000 villages and slums of India while maintaining a 99% repayment rate and growing at over 100% per year. This pace has attracted equity investments from premier venture capitalists including Vinod Khosla (co-founder of Sun Microsystems) and Sequoia, (early investor in companies such as Cisco, Yahoo and Google).

Vikram is a former management consultant with McKinsey, has a B.A. in philosophy from Tufts, an M.A. from Yale, a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and was a Fulbright Scholar. He has received several awards, including the Social Entrepreneur of the Year in India (2006), the Ernst & Young Start-Up Entrepreneur of the Year in India (2006) and he has been profiled in media ranging from CNN to front page of the Wall Street Journal.

Summit Video: Vikram Akula
Financial Literacy and Banking the Unbanked: From Third World Poor to First World Under-Served