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A Bangladeshi Nobel Peace Prize winning banker has said that financial systems across the world should be redesigned to provide low-income households a chance to escape poverty. Muhammad Yunus, who is the founder of Bangladesh’s Grameen Bank -which provides small loans to the impoverished without requiring collateral, said: “The banking institution needs to be redesigned because it's now only for customers who already have a lot of money.” “Banks ignore all the people who don't have money or who are poor. Billions of people are excluded from that system. So in this financial crisis again you remind yourself, this is actually a wake-up call that something is wrong in the system - particularly in the financial system.” “This is the time to... move on to a better financial system, and that... should be an inclusive system,” Sky News quoted Yunus, as saying. He further called for banks to branch out into what he termed “social business” - profit-making enterprises whose primary objective is to solve a social problem. “Social business is a new category of business to address the problems that we face around the world, rather than making money. Conventional business is all about making money,” Yunus said. “This is a cause-driven business where you don't want to make any money at all, but the company makes profit, profit stays with the company and investors don't want to take any profit because their whole intention is to solve a social problem,” he added.

‘Impoverished’ must be included for successful financial system: Grameen Bank founder