Faisel Rahman, Managing Director, Fair Finance

Quite early on, when I was around 17/18, my mum took me to see a lecturer, a Bengali economist who had come to the UK. Her line was kind of, ‘Come on, Faisel, you’ve campaigned against everything… come and hear this guy who says that he’s doing something quite positive against the evil of capitalism that you’re trying to overthrow.’

So this was a guy who was talking about lending small amounts of money to women in villages in Bangladesh and he pretty much said he was using the powers of capitalism in a positive way to make change. So I remember standing up as an 18 year-old and saying, ‘That sounds like the most stupid idea I’ve ever heard. Surely if you lend money to people who don’t have it you won’t get it back?’ To which he responded, ‘What’s the point of lending money to people that had it? That’s easy. Try and figure out how you lend money to people that don’t have it because they need it.’

So I went out to Bangladesh to try and figure out why micro-finance was wrong. He won the Nobel Prize so I then spent the next two years trying to figure out why I was wrong and he was right.To say I learnt a lot about micro-finance is probably a lie… I probably learnt a lot about people and learnt a lot about people’s choices and finances… and I was fascinated.

Faisel Rahman, Managing Director, Fair Finance