Financial resilience: investing for positive change

As with any investment, your capital is at risk. 

Poverty is often framed as a question of low incomes. But for many households, it is just as much about what happens when income is interrupted, or when an unexpected expense arrives without a buffer to absorb it.

For billions of people, that shock can arrive in a single week: an accident, an illness, an unplanned bill. For some, these are mere setbacks. But for many, these are turning points, moments when years of progress unravel in a matter of days. The WHO and World Bank estimate that:

• 2.1 billion people experience financial hardship accessing health care;
• 1.6 billion people are living in poverty or pushed deeper into it by out-of-pocket health expenses.

The difference between these groups is resilience. But across many emerging markets, this resilience is shockingly thin. Healthcare is often paid out of pocket. Safety nets can be limited, and a brief interruption in work can quickly lead to financial ruin.

This is not just an income gap. It is a resilience gap.

Redesigning protection around real lives

Companies that broaden access to essential financial protection can help households absorb setbacks without being pushed into poverty.

The financial sector is traditionally considered highly cyclical. In this case, however, the opportunity and drivers are tied to long-term structural trends: rising incomes, urbanisation, and increasing expectations of financial stability across many emerging markets, combined with technological advancements that are enabling simple, affordable, and tailored products, as well as new, scalable distribution models.

Insurance is a key example. It exists to transfer risk, but historically, it’s been out of reach for many who need it most. Products have been too expensive, too complex or too disconnected from how people live and earn.

In many emerging markets, that’s now changing. Cover is becoming simpler, smaller, and more embedded in daily life, purchased digitally, tailored to specific risks, and distributed through platforms people already use.

This is having a meaningful societal impact, as well as being reflected in the performance of well-positioned companies.

To better understand this important and rapidly evolving topic, we wanted to know whether protection is reaching those who need it. That is why we have used the services of companies like 60 Decibels, a social impact measurement organisation that gathers direct feedback from end users across emerging markets, because understanding impact means listening to customers, not just reading disclosures.

That ground-level perspective helps us assess whether products are genuinely improving customers' lives, and it informs where we see the strongest opportunities to support impact at scale.

Prudential: widening access in underpenetrated markets

In Ghana, Prudential's Mekakrawa micro-insurance product offers cover for premiums as low as US$0.25 a month. Insurance vending machines sell policies for under US$10 annually. These are small-ticket products, but they reflect a big shift: protection becoming easier to buy, easier to understand, and available through channels that fit everyday life.

We first invested in Prudential in 2025 because it is building something rare: a scaled franchise across 25 markets in Asia and Africa, where the protection gap remains wide. As incomes rise and healthcare costs climb, more households are looking for simple ways to protect progress from being undone by a single shock.

The most compelling point is what lies ahead. Management is targeting new business profit of up to US$4.2bn by 2027. The populations Prudential is reaching are at the beginning of a decades-long journey toward greater financial security – and Prudential is becoming the infrastructure through which that journey is made.

Grab: embedding protection into everyday platforms

In 2024, Grab disbursed around US$2.2bn in credit to underserved groups, with one in three driver-partners having accessed a loan. A platform that started as a ride-hailing app has become a daily financial infrastructure across Southeast Asia, offering payments, working capital loans and embedded insurance.

We invested in Grab because that reach creates something powerful. The platform sees how users earn, spend and manage cash flow, allowing it to deliver financial tools at the moments they matter most. Fintech revenue grew 39 per cent in 2025, its gross loan portfolio reached US$1.3bn, and Grab's digital banks had attracted 7.4m deposit customers.

What is most promising is how quickly Grab is building broader financial services on top of an ecosystem people already use. As more drivers, merchants and households transact through Grab, it can offer the next layer of resilience tools: credit, savings and insurance, without the friction of a traditional branch-led model.

Why this matters for the future

Prudential and Grab tackle different parts of the problem but share the same underlying logic: financial resilience is one of the most underappreciated growth themes of the next two decades – hiding in plain sight precisely because it serves people that markets have historically ignored.

The World Bank's Global Findex 2025 report estimates that 1.3 billion adults globally remain outside the formal financial system, the majority in low- and middle-income economies. Digital platforms are scaling rapidly, bringing millions into more formal financial systems in ways previously not possible.

Progress is already evident – the unbanked count has fallen from 2 billion in 2014 to 1.3 billion today. But the scale of unmet need remains vast, and the pace of change is accelerating.

The expectation is shifting: that protection should exist, be affordable, and arrive when it's needed. Prudential and Grab are building the systems that make that expectation a reality. Be it when Prudential sells a policy in Ghana, or Grab extends credit to a driver in Jakarta, resilience compounds – for the individual, for the economy, and for the long-term owner of the business.

For Positive Change, which seeks companies whose commercial success is inseparable from the societal progress they enable, financial resilience is not a supporting theme – it sits at the heart of what we are trying to achieve. 

 To explore more of the areas in which Positive Change invests, visit our Insights pages.

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This communication was produced and approved in May 2026 and has not been updated subsequently. It represents views held at the time of writing and may not reflect current thinking.

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