About Globefin
Globefin.org is a nonprofit seeking to improve global economic development by advancing the internationalization of financial education and innovation. We create educational content from a global perspective and serve as a hub for students, educators, researchers, and innovators around the world. We are heavy users of AI to leverage our abilities and discover new ideas.
We promote the provision of basic needs to everyone on earth through financial innovation.
Food, clean water, shelter, health care, energy and schooling are not scarce in the world as a whole. They are unevenly financed. A clinic that would pay for itself in one country cannot raise a loan in another. A good idea in one market often has no route to the places that need it most, because nobody has built the financing that would carry it there.
Politics is how the world forms its will, deciding what ought to be done. Finance is how that decision gets carried out. It is the way rather than the will, and a decision with no way to execute it stays a decision.
We believe the will to meet basic needs is already there. Almost nobody argues that children should go without water or schooling. What is missing is the way: financing that reaches the places and the people in question. If basic needs are going to be met everywhere, the tools of finance have to work everywhere, which means inventing the ones that do not exist yet. That invention is the work we organize, in the open, with anyone who would like to join it.
What is financial innovation?
Financial innovation is any change that lets finance do something it could not do before. It is broader than a clever instrument. It arrives in five forms, and the useful work almost always needs more than one of them at the same time.
New technology
Mobile money, instant settlement, satellite data behind a crop insurance policy, AI reading a market nobody has ever written about. Technology lowers the cost of knowing and the cost of moving value.
New laws and rules
A rule that lets a cooperative hold deposits, a registry that makes a land title bankable, a court that will enforce a lease. Law sets the outer edge of what any of the rest can do.
New products
The instruments themselves: the microloan, index insurance, revenue-based repayment, a bond whose cost falls as the water gets cleaner. Each one is a way of sharing risk and timing that did not exist before.
New institutions
Someone has to issue, hold, price and stand behind the promise. Village banks, mutual insurers, clearinghouses, development funds and exchanges are all inventions, and most of them are young.
New goals
What we ask finance to accomplish. When the objective grows from return alone to return alongside a school built or a clinic kept open, everything upstream of it gets redesigned.
The five depend on each other. A product no law permits, or a technology no institution will operate, is not yet an innovation. The interesting work sits where they meet, and that is where our programs put students, teachers, researchers and innovators: on real problems, in real markets, with the goal of getting basic needs financed.
Our programs
Four programs carry the mission. Each is running today at a modest size, and each is built to keep going until it reaches every part of the world. We have set both side by side, so you can see where we stand now and what we are aiming at.
Global Financial Innovation COIL class
A course in financial innovation taught jointly by instructors in different countries. Collaborative Online International Learning puts one classroom in two or more places at once, and gives every student teammates who see the same problem from a different market.
A course run with partner instructors and students across a handful of countries, drawn from our open curriculum of 616 lessons across 41 tracks.
A standing class any instructor anywhere can join, with teams in every region and every time zone, so that finance is learned as a global subject from the first week.
Web Page Challenges
Open invitations to build one self-contained web page that demonstrates an idea: a model, a tool, a piece of analysis. Members build them with AI and publish them in our Sandbox, where they run live in the browser for anyone to try.
Challenges running in the Sandbox, where members publish working pages built on our data and on public sources.
A challenge open in every market and every language, and a public library of working tools aimed at basic needs that anyone can copy, adapt and run where they live.
Innovation Updates
A regular briefing on what is being invented in finance and where, backed by a knowledge base of the companies, people and sources behind each development, searchable and available as an API.
A weekly update covering developments from markets around the world, together with the growing knowledge base that sits behind it.
Every market on earth covered, the small and under-reported ones included, kept current and kept free, so an innovation in one country is known and usable in all the others.
Map Around Plots (MAPs)
Every person on earth gets a block of the map: one 0.001 degree square of latitude and longitude, roughly a hundred metres across. A MAP works outward from that block, taking stock of the finance around it, which basic needs go unmet there, and what capital and institutions are within reach. Blocks can also be bought by supporters who want to back the work.
The first blocks assigned and mapped by our team and our members from public data and local knowledge, proving out the method one square at a time.
A block for every person alive and a MAP for every inhabited square: an atlas of unmet needs and reachable capital, so any innovation can be measured against the places it would actually serve.
Global scope has become a reasonable ambition
An organization our size could not have promised this a decade ago. Working at global scope meant reading every market, in every language, under every regulator, and no small team could carry that load. Most efforts settled for a sample and hoped the sample stood for the rest of the world.
AI changes that arithmetic, and it is the reason we set the scope where we do. We use it in two turns.
Reach the edge
We use AI to push every activity outward to the global edge of its scope: every country, every market, every language, the small and quiet places along with the large ones. In a class that means partners anywhere. In the knowledge base it means markets nobody reports on. In a MAP it means blocks of the map that have never appeared in a financial dataset at all.
Fill in what is missing
Once we are at the edge, we turn AI back on everything we have gathered and read it whole. Seeing all the places at once shows which needs go unmet, which financing structures travel well and which do not, and where something still has to be invented. That is what we use to fill in the gaps, with innovation learned from the work of innovating at global scale.
Neither turn does much alone. The edge is where the information lives, and the second pass is what turns it into something useful: financing that puts food, water, shelter, care, power and schooling within reach of people who do not have them today. It is a large ambition, and we would rather aim at the whole world than at a comfortable fraction of it.
The Globefin blog
We write as we go. The blog carries longer essays on finance and innovation, notes on what we are learning as we build the platform, and the thinking behind each of the programs above. It is the best place to follow the work in detail.
Visit the blogOur team
The people building Globefin — founders, advisors, and contributors across regions and disciplines.
How to help
Globefin is owned and operated by Library B Development Corporation, a Kentucky non-profit corporation. The platform is free to use, and our lessons and other educational content are openly licensed so that anyone can share and build on them.
We welcome partnerships with organizations and individuals who share our mission, and we are seeking sponsors to help expand global access to finance education. We are also looking for volunteers to help build the platform. If you have comments or would like to get involved, we'd like to hear from you.
It isn’t a fin, it isn’t a sail, it’s a sign of freedom
The shape in our logo is a Phrygian cap, a common symbol of liberty from antiquity. We use it because we believe the internationalization of finance and innnovation with AI is a critical tool for delivering freedom and prosperity to everyone in the world.
The cap turns up almost everywhere. Venice put it on the Doge instead of a crown. American printers carved it onto seals and currency in the 1770s, and French revolutionaries made it red. Today it sits where a crown would sit on the arms of Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua and Paraguay, and above the shield on the seal of the United States Senate. Peru put it on its money instead, where it stayed for a century. No one country owns it, which is part of why we chose it. Read the full history on Wikipedia.
A soft conical cap with the point folded forward. Worn in ancient Phrygia, in what is now central Turkey.
A statue of Attis. Greek and Roman artists put the cap on figures from the east — Paris of Troy, Ganymede, the god Mithras.
Marianne, who stands for the French Republic, has worn the red bonnet since the 1790s. This bust is in the Palais du Luxembourg.
Clasped hands hold the cap up on a pike: in unity there is strength, and in strength, freedom. Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua and Paraguay carry it too.
A red cap sits on top of the fasces, in the spot a crown would occupy. The design dates to 1849, more than fifty years before independence.
Peru put the cap on its money rather than its coat of arms. Liberty holds it aloft on a pike on the silver sol, struck from 1863 well into the 1900s.
A red cap sits above the shield on the Senate seal, and on the seals of several states. It appeared on circulating US coinage until 1947.