Finmo is a finalist in the Mayor of London’s Resilience Fund!
We are so proud and excited to announce that we’re one of 4 finalists selected for the Mayor of London’s Resilience Fund Gig Economy Challenge.
The initiative, which is in partnership with Nesta Challenges, has been launched to help London emerge stronger from Covid-19, and to equip it to face any future disruptive challenges.
Among the vital issues the fund will tackle are things like air pollution, food insecurity, and unaffordable workspaces. To do so, the initiative is looking to a range of tech SMEs (hello!), engineers, social enterprises and other organisations to help improve these problem areas with future-focused and genuinely innovative solutions.
Helping London’s invaluable gig economy workforce
Each business who applied for the Resilience Fund challenge was tasked with proposing a robust solution to one of these specific challenges.
For us here at Finmo, it was the ‘Gig Economy Challenge’, which asks for a digital service that helps gig workers understand their take home pay, and whether they’re paid the London Living Wage.
Helping sole traders to identify and understand their earnings and expenses forms a major part of what we do here at Finmo. So, as soon as we saw the brief, we knew wholeheartedly that we could not only meet it, but go above and beyond its requirements.
With our solution, we really want to dig into the ‘so what?’ of the task at hand – what value can this information bring to a gig worker’s life? How can we utilise our technology, knowledge and experience to build out something extraordinary, and which is genuinely going to make a difference?
It goes without saying that the challenge definitely taps into our passion for using imaginative, future-focused thinking to solve problems for the modern-day worker. Likewise, we could not be more thrilled to have been selected for this stage, which will see us working alongside the Living Wage Foundation in planning and researching our solution.
Time to roll up our sleeves!
Now that we’re through to the final stage of the Resilience Fund, the entire Finmo team is working full steam ahead in researching and planning what our solution will look like. Working off the back of our existing product infrastructure, we plan to create a system that gives gig-economy workers a much clearer view of their take-home pay – that is, their net hourly wage, which so many gig workers don’t currently have the means of fully understanding thanks to the complex nature of their income and business expense situations.
We think that a user-friendly service that helps workers gain this knowledge and transparency about their own wages shouldn’t be seen as just a nice-to-have, but as an essential tool. One that all gig workers, side-hustlers and self-employed professionals are able to access.
As our users know, at Finmo we’re about so much more than providing a means to an end, which is why we put so much energy into developing our educational material, as well as exciting partnerships with like-minded organisations.
We believe that every self-employed worker has a right to financial knowledge, and ultimately empowerment – without it, they face unfair disadvantages compared with someone who has a clear and accessible view of their earnings.
Watch this space
We have about five weeks to research and plan out our solution, after which a winner of the Gig Economy Challenge will be selected to bring their vision to life. We’ll keep you updated with our progress across our social media channels – watch this space!
Check out our video from our CEO, J.D., to find out more about what we’re doing, and why.
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