Konstantin Peric

Konstantin Peric (Kosta Peric) is a technologist, author, illustrator and recognised thought leader, who has focused his career on the fusion between technology, finance and innovation. Kosta currently holds the deputy director position of Financial Services for the Poor at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where he leads the team that focuses on financial inclusion and digital payments. 

Kosta Peric is one of the top leading financial / fintech worldwide personalities according to various international finance outlets like FinServ 25 – The Most Influential Voices in Banking (The Financial Brand); Institutional Investor’s Top 100 Influencers and Brands and Onalytica’s Top 100 Influencers and Brands. Konstantin has also written several books and essays.

Konstantin Peric was born on Oct 19, 1961, in former Yugoslavia (now Serbia). At the age of 10, Kosta moved with his family to Bujumbura, Burundi after his father, a geophysicist for United Nations, was allocated there. In Burundi, he graduated from secondary school. Later on, at 18, he moved to Brussels to study computer science at the Free University of Brussels (Université Libre de Bruxelles). 

In 2009, Kosta Peric joined the SWIFT Initiative. There, Kosta co-founded and led Innotribe, an initiative to enable collaborative innovation in the financial industry. Innotribe -which stands for Innovation + Tribe-, was meant to foster creative thinking in financial services through a number of events while a new Incubator was created to support innovative new solutions. At SWIFT, he was also the chief architect of SWIFTNet, the backbone worldwide secure network of 8,000 banks and 1,000 corporations to service daily the world economy.

In August 2013 Kosta joined the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as the Deputy Director of Financial Services for the Poor. His main role is to lead the team that focuses on digital payments. He oversees the strategy and grants to deliver secure, reliable and affordable digital payment solutions. Focusing on the needs of poor people whether they are urban or rural, Kosta is responsible for the technical direction and leadership of the digital payments systems initiative, accelerating the adoption and use of financial services in developing countries. The emphasis is on making these services available at zero or very low cost for the poor. Engaging all the way from visioning to architecture to partnership to building and development.

Kosta’s vision is associated with a solid work of fast-forward vision and praxis that relates society, innovation, disruption, digital and finance inclusion and innovation. And his thoughts and writings have always tried to align theory and praxis, solving problems with an “eternal optimist take”. 

He affirms that “we are halfway in the digital revolution and we have digitised pictures, books (…) so the next thing is money, reputation and digitising ourselves” and in a time when humans digitised everything, reputation and digital inclusion are critical. Kosta is especially interested in financial inclusion. As the Deputy Director of Financial Services for the Poor at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, he puts his efforts to build what he calls a digital financial system that, if successful, would include everyone in financial services.

For him, financial inclusion means creating channels of financial support during times when people need it the most. “When I say poor people, I’m really looking at extreme poverty that is currently being defined by the World Bank as people who have, on average, less than $2 of income per day. Remember, when you say that, it’s an average with many living well below even this level of poverty. As a matter of fact, these people live quite complicated lives from that financial perspective, with many sources of irregular revenues coming from jobs, often times several jobs. Equally, if you think about agriculture, there is of course the irregularity of crops and harvests, with some years of crop failure and famine” Konstantin Peric As per his vision, dealing with cash in these circumstances actually proves to be an aggravating factor from several perspectives. 

For example, the risk perspective of simply having cash; the risk of being exposed to a lot of corruption that goes with the distribution of cash and the ability to absorb financial shocks, which is all about financial instruments being available such as payments, as well as the capacity to save money. We need to help people to manage money in order to have the capacity to finance projects; pay school tuition; for children to pay for utilities; and also unforeseen shocks that inevitably come. Good shocks, such as marriage, or challenging shocks, such as a death in the family, and so on,” Kosta explained.