Yasuhiro ‘Hiro’ Kawakami
Co-Founder & CEO
I spent nine years at IFC financing emerging markets from the top down. What stayed with me was not the deal flow but the people — the warmth and decency of ordinary people across the markets we financed. I believe the world needs peace and prosperity to become better, and that emerging markets, where the room to grow is largest, are the engine of that growth.
Those nine years also confirmed something else: structured finance is a highly effective tool for putting capital to its most efficient use. Pensata is my answer to what it leaves unsolved — and to the person the top-down vantage point could never touch: the applicant at the counter whom the system cannot see. Our work is to make portfolio criteria inclusive — to make the invisible borrower measurable, one person at a time.
I am an inventor first, and entrepreneurship is the vehicle. Through this company, I intend to establish BYLAS™ as a standard unit of measurement in the world’s financial infrastructure. That is the job I have set myself.
