Lucas Ramirez believes that with discipline, focus and hard work, anything is possible. The “anything is possible” mindset has served him well in his role as CFO of Grameen America, a nonprofit dedicated to helping low-income women build small businesses to create better lives for their families. It offers access to loan capital, financial education, asset- and credit-building, and peer support to transform communities and advance financial mobility in the United States.
Lucas Ramirez brings global finance expertise to Grameen America, leading efforts to expand … [+]
a has invested over $5 billion to more than 220,000 women entrepreneurs across 29 cities in the U.S.
Lucas and I recently discussed splitting his career between the U.S. and Latin America, how he learned the value of a dollar and more.
Throughout his career, Lucas Ramirez has split his time evenly between Latin America and the United States. Originally from Colombia, South America, having diverse international opportunities allowed him to appreciate where he came from and what he has achieved.
That sense of appreciation started as a college student. While in college in Miami, Ramirez worked for a Colombian-based underwear manufacturer that was entering the U.S. market. He joined the team and worked in the warehouse, handling everything from taking orders to shipping boxes to keeping the books.
“I did that for about six months as I finished college,” Ramirez said. It was the first time I earned a buck on my own and learned the value of earning a living. It helps me even in my job now, where we have a big front-line workforce that is in front of customers every day.”
After graduating, Ramirez went on to work for Merrill Lynch in New York, another moment that put his journey into perspective, having lived in a country filled with its fair share of challenges.
“I view that journey of going from a small town in the Andean mountains of Colombia to Wall Street and working at Merrill Lynch as a formative journey,” he explained. “It taught me that with discipline, focus, and hard work, you can pretty much achieve what you put your mind into.”
He stayed at Merrill Lynch for about five years, focusing on the equity research side of investment banking and covering financial institutions. It provided the fundamentals of financial modeling, valuation, value drivers, and industry analysis while taking him through the demanding nature and analytical rigor of stock forecasting.
His career called him back to Latin America to continue working in investment banking at one of the largest financial groups in the region. He did a lot of M&A and capital markets work, helping companies expand across Latin America and raising the capital for that expansion via equity or debt offerings. Ramirez did the capital markets and investment banking stint for about 20 years. Then he decided that he wanted to transition to a CFO role, so he took a year off, went to school, and spent time transitioning from investment banking to more managerial roles.
The path eventually led him to Grameen America, the largest and fastest-growing microfinance institution in the U.S. Its mission is to help low-income, entrepreneurial women build businesses to achieve financial mobility.
“We exist to change the life trajectories of low-income minority entrepreneurs who have been marginalized by the financial system,” Ramirez said.
The organization does that through a microlending program and a technical assistance organization that provides women with training in health, business, education, the community and the network to succeed as entrepreneurs. It was founded by Muhammad Yunus, a Nobel Laureate and “father of microfinance.”
“He felt that a woman could lift herself out of poverty through her entrepreneurial spirit if she got the right opportunity,” Ramirez said. “He started giving micro-loans to poor women in Bangladesh in the early 80s. Since it was founded in 2008, Grameen America has dispersed over $5 billion in microloans to about 220,000 entrepreneurs in the U.S., but we’re just scratching the surface of what we can do. We’ve penetrated less than 2 percent of the addressable market.”
Over the next decade, they have an ambitious growth plan, expecting to grow their disbursement by 10 times to $40 billion and reach 750,000 borrowers.
It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be a part of such an ambitious goal–and to combine finance with social impact. Those qualities, in addition to the fact that he could do so alongside the company’s leadership, drew him to the role. He considers Yunus an amazing visionary and inspirational leader who has flipped core financial principles upside down. Additionally, he calls the chance to work with and learn from Grameen’s CEO, Andrea Jung, a tremendous career journey.
“The opportunity to come in and work with the leadership team to help architect the next phase of growth seemed like an exciting place to spend the next stage of my career, being associated with the movement that Professor Muhammad Yunus created around the world,” Ramirez said. “It’s a place where you wake up every day very excited to come to work because we know that if we succeed, there will be thousands of women who are succeeding and were able to change their life trajectory.”
The appreciation for Grameen’s culture is one he shares with Jung. In addition to a shared passion for the mission of empowering women, a strategic view on their roles and responsibilities guides their work together. He views the CEO as being in charge of the vision, whereas the CFO puts structure, processes and systems in place to determine the how.
But, there are also key personality traits that make their collaboration work.
“The relationship has to be billed on trust,” he said. “You have to be able to have an open and candid conversation both about the opportunities and different challenges and have open communication. I try to ask the right questions to make sure that I always know what’s on her mind, what the priorities are and what are the key organizational things where I should jump in, not only from a CFO role but from an enterprise leader standpoint. It’s also important to know when to pull the CEO into financial-related matters and be selective about that.”
From a statistical perspective, Grameen may have more financial matters on its radar than most organizations due to the quantity of small transactions that are processed. It processes more than 100,000 per week. But, since the beginning the organization invested in technology.
“We went digital cashless, and there was a big digital transformation that started a few years ago,” Ramirez explained. “We changed to a cloud-based system for our core banking operations, which was essential to be able to absorb our volume of transactions. We are now investing heavily in a borrower app. The member can self-service much better and apply for the loans through the app. It allows us not only to improve the user experience and generate efficiencies on the back end but also to much better capture data.
Embedding technology in everything they do is essential for scaling. With plans in place to scale to 300,000 customers over the next few years, it would be impossible without embedding tech. It’s an approach that exists organization-wide, not just in a finance function itself, and is being used for more descritive analytics, dashboarding, working visualization and automating financial analysis.
To Ramirez, analysis is not just about financial metrics; he is actively measuring social and operating metrics as well.
“That’s also one of the differences between working in a social enterprise,” he said. “In any company, you have the financial metrics as a lagging indicator. We look at the same metrics that any bank would look at, like capital adequacy, credit quality, liquidity, non-performing loans, unit economics and return on capital. In a social business, you have to apply the same business principles. You have to layer the social impact. We look at the number of borrowers that we are able to impact, the number of loans that we give out, the size of the loans we measure and the impact that we have on their business income, their savings, or their credit scores. We don’t require a credit score for them to join the program. We start reporting to the bureaus, and we see if our reporting of their successful repayment has improved their credit scores. Then, they can have access to other, more mainstream financial products.”
Grameen is venturing into a new project called the Financial Diaries, going into the financial lives of a few of their borrowers to understand the volatility of their income, the volatility of their expenses, and what the finances of a low-income household look like. It’s another initiative that will enable the organization to design products for impact, show the impact that they made on the lives of women, influence the broader financial inclusion ecosystem and mobilize more capital from impact investors toward financial inclusion.
Outside of his work at Grameen, Ramirez aims to achieve what he calls “work-life harmony.” He doesn’t refer to it as balance simply because it is a constant challenge.
“It’s hard to have balance with such a demanding role,” he said. “It’s important to take good care of yourself first. Manage your energy and manage your mental and physical health. You can’t show up in your job with the level of energy that you need unless you take good care of yourself and prioritize your health.”
He accomplishes this by setting boundaries around time because of how possible it is for work to be all-consuming. Ramirez has a disciplined routine of physical and mental health activities that he does nearly every day–namely, exercise and meditation. And, he doesn’t let travel serve as an excuse. He uses an app and can exercise in a hotel room for 15 minutes. He stresses that it changes a person’s energy, the way they show up in meetings, and the level of energy that they bring to conversations.
For any professionals who aspire to take on the CFO role, in addition to making mental and physical health priorities, he advises three things.
“Seek a breadth of perspectives, go outside of your swim lane, and become well-rounded,” he begins. “The success of the CFO role will be defined by the ability to go outside of your swim lane. Second, build a network. You will need a strong operational network inside the organization to get things done. Lastly, become tech-savvy. Technology is transforming all industries and the finance function. Tech and AI will not replace the CFO role, but tech-savvy CFOs will be much more effective and successful in adding value to their organizations.”