9.10.2008 - 03:35pm ET

(CSRwire) AUSTIN, Texas, Sept. 10 /PRNewswire/ -- MPOWER Ventures, a socially committed venture fund that invests in financial service companies targeting underserved markets, today announced it has established the MPOWER Foundation to further its mission of empowering the world's underserved. The MPOWER Foundation will fund, conceive and operate financial education, research, policy and other social initiatives that seek to remedy the financial exclusion of more than 2 billion underserved consumers around the world. The new foundation extends the work of the MPOWER group of companies to support mission-critical programs that cannot realistically achieve sustainable financial returns. It will run programs independently and through strategic partnerships with academic, governmental and nonprofit institutions targeting the underserved.

"Bringing financial empowerment to as many of the 2 billion underserved as possible is a need too vast for any single company to address, so we formed MPOWER Ventures and MPOWER Labs to fund and support a group of entrepreneurs whose companies serve a common mission in different ways," said Roy Sosa, founding partner of MPOWER Ventures. "While most of our work reflects our belief that market-based solutions can realize sustainable change on the broadest scale, we will pursue high-impact opportunities to serve our mission whether we can expect a financial return or not. The MPOWER Foundation allows us to do that."

Like MPOWER Ventures, the MPOWER Foundation is founded on the belief that entrepreneurship and collaboration are the keys to unlocking innovation that leads to lasting social change. The foundation will identify and select program investments employing a venture investment model that mirrors the core principles of MPOWER Ventures. The MPOWER Foundation deploys patient capital with longer-term investment horizons that encourage social returns, and its investment guidelines heavily emphasize quantitative impact measures.

"We invest in people, not projects," says MPOWER Foundation president and founder, Suzi Sosa. "We are looking to partner with social entrepreneurs who have the vision to affect substantial change. We believe that social projects should be held to the same standards of performance and excellence as our private-sector investments."

At the same time, the MPOWER Foundation also emphasizes research, innovation and collaboration. "We are incubating programs that leverage disruptive technologies to better reach the underserved. We are actively building cross-sector partnerships with companies,universities, and multi-lateral organizations that have a global reach," Sosa adds.

Suzi Sosa will lead the MPOWER Foundation and oversee its strategic partnerships, initiatives and impact evaluation. She has a unique blend of experience in the public, non-profit and private sectors and brings expertise in social entrepreneurship and social venture investing, economics and non-profit capacity building. She holds a master's in Public Administration from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and has served in the Governments of the United States, Bermuda and Lebanon as a policy advisor.

The MPOWER Foundation is an independent, non-profit organization. It awards grants by invitation only.

About MPOWER Ventures
MPOWER Ventures is a double-bottom-line venture capital fund based in Austin, Texas. Fueled by the belief that the combination of innovation, collaboration and disruptive technology can stimulate fundamental change that frees latent economic potential and generates meaningful social impact, MPOWER Ventures identifies and invests in early-stage businesses creating products and services for the underserved. MPOWER Ventures currently focuses its investment portfolio in financial services with investments in international payments, mobile payments and retail financial services.