The U.S. economy has found a new ally on Latino-owned businesses(LOBs), and the U.S. Department of Treasury along with JPMorgan Chase & Co. know it! that’s because unlike other high-risk ventures, LOBs turn early-stage financing into GDP growth faster than anyone else.
Maybe it’s a need to assert our own culture in the market, or the lack of job opportunities for the Hispanic population, whatever the reason is, Latino entrepreneurs are on the fast-track to rule the U.S. market with all the new small businesses under their belt, opening faster than the rest of the startup population.
One just has to look at the numbers to realize the potential of Latino entrepreneurship. Taking into consideration that Latinos will make up 29% of all U.S. population by 2050, and that 70% of them are starting their businesses with their own personal savings (only 6% of this financing coming from commercial loans), a Stanford study has calculated that if Latino ventures grow at the same rate as the U.S. average (being this the challenge), we’re talking about a $1.4 trillion surplus on our economy, that’s 8% of our $18 trillion GDP.
The trick as mentioned above, is to actually make them grow on par with the U.S. average, in an earlier article, we talked about the racial wealth gap in the country and how grim of a picture it painted for our Latino future. However what we learned since then, is that there is a growing number of nonprofit accelerators popping up, that are doing everything they can to accelerate funding opportunities to LOB’s.
One of these nonprofit organizations is Accion, their mission is to help Latino startups become elegible for commercial financing, and they’re not alone, they are being funded by no other than our own U.S. government and by JPMorgan Chase & Co. We all know that these two aren’t the most charitable operations out there, so why would they invest on Latino business? Easy, because unlike many among us, they actually believe that these Latino startups will thrive and become tomorrow’s job creators, depositors, taxpayers, the foundation for a stronger and better U.S. economy.
Accion has even been able to secure funding for entrepreneurs born outside of the U.S. Take Rodrigo and Filberto Santoyo’s story for example, back in 2004, the brothers emigrated from Mexico to Denver, Colorado, with the hopes of starting a food-truck business, with no credit history in the country (or in Mexico for that matter), their application for funding was understandably rejected. Once they were referred to Accion though, everything changed. The nonprofit taught the brothers how to start a credit history in order to secure a loan. “We were able to find a lot of good people willing to help and provide education and resources for understanding how to manage your business and navigate the systems here,” Rodrigo told the people at JPMorgan Chase. Now the brothers own two food trucks and are hopeful that they will expand into a brick-and-mortar restaurant chain.
That’s the power of the Latino community, just imagine how good those $1.4 trillion would sit on our economy, that’s more money than the federal government was able to collect in the first half of this year, if we continue to support our Latino ventures, we could expect a nice tax cut in the future, or at the very least better services for all American citizens.
JPMorgan Chase supports innovative strategies to help small businesses thrive, which is the focus of their $30 million, five-year Small Business Forward program, aimed at growing local, community-based small businesses through a combination of targeted lending to minority-owned businesses, new kinds of community development financing and technical assistance for entrepreneurs. JPMorgan Chase is dedicated to helping minority- and community-based small-business owners become engines of job growth and economic vitality in the neighborhoods they serve.
Taken from the JPMorgan Chase website