Anne Marie van Swinderen has been active in financial inclusion for three decades, living and working in three continents. She founded L-IFT in 2015 in order to focus on financial diaries and data empowerment of disadvantaged people. She is still fascinated by the complexity of people’s financial lives and their pandora’s box of tricks for solving challenges. Soon after founding L-IFT it became clear that participants of diaries studies appreciate the process and find they benefit from the approach and the data. L-IFT’s goal is now to assist large groups of under-served people to be able to build their financial history and use their data for decision making. L-IFT started building its technology FINBIT in 2018. FINBIT has now been used by about 10,000 people from 17 countries. She holds an MPhil from the Open University and a Bsc(ECON) from the London School of Economics.
