Opportunity Finance Network: Scaling small business lending through CDFI-led innovation

Our programs

Opportunity Finance Network (OFN) is the leading national network of Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) and a financial intermediary. OFN increases capital flow, strengthens CDFIs, and amplifies the voice of the CDFI industry, partnering with investors, funders, and policymakers to align capital with opportunity.

How Opportunity Finance Network supports small businesses across the United States

  • Community development finance stands at a pivotal crossroads — with historic tailwinds and relentless headwinds — that center on both the opportunity to support historic levels of entrepreneurship as well as the challenge of navigating political and economic uncertainty. Yet, amid these challenges, the mission of CDFIs has become not only more urgent, but more visible — and more viable — as a solution to market failure that centers access and impact in communities.
  • Opportunity Finance Network (OFN), a national network of more than 475 CDFIs, works to ensure the industry can meet the moment. Its members — including loan funds, credit unions, banks, and venture capital funds — provide responsible financing to communities long excluded from mainstream capital markets. To modernize and strengthen this field, OFN launched the CDFI Innovation Initiative, a sustained investment to institutionalize innovation, reimagine the structuring of community development finance, and develop new tools to deepen impact across the country.

Program overview

Our work together

Together with support from Mastercard Strive USA, OFN is launching the CDFI Innovation Initiative to transform small business lending within the CDFI industry. The CDFI Innovation Initiative will achieve this by focusing on three core pillars:

  • Innovation Council. A collaborative forum of experts, CDFI leaders, funders, and thinkers who will shape the direction of innovation across the industry.
  • Innovation Center. An action tank will seed innovation and accelerate promising solutions.
  • Innovation Fund. A blended capital pool designed to capitalize high-potential ideas from concept to scale, ensuring innovations reach the communities that need them most.

Through strategic investment in four foundational areas, the CDFI Innovation Initiative aims to build long-term capacity and systemic transformation: 

  • Capital solutions that drive new capital and financing solutions to help CDFIs attract more financing and new investor types. OFN is positioning CDFIs to access flexible, low-cost, long-term capital, coupled with philanthropic support, to grow their balance sheets or financing tools. 
  • Financing products that expand access to capital in low-income and underserved communities. OFN is developing gap-filling financing products for CDFIs; examples include technical products like working capital for small businesses, products to support community asset ownership, disaster recovery, and secondary markets to advance climate resilient infrastructure.
  • Technology and operational efficiency innovations that transform how CDFIs do business. OFN is positioning CDFIs to take advantage of advances in ethical AI, shared services models, and technology to improve productivity and operating models.
  • Data, systems, and analytics that increase performance, track outcomes, and capture narratives to support CDFI scale, investment, and impact.

OFN will also share findings and solutions through its Small Business Finance Forum, annual conference, and other industry convenings, to ensure the impact of the CDFI Innovation Initiative extends across the broader ecosystem.

By the numbers

  • As of 2023, OFN’s network of CDFIs has originated $123 billion in financing across all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. 
  • That capital has helped start or expand more than one million small businesses and microenterprises, created or maintained more nearly 3.4 million jobs, and supported the development or rehabilitation of more than three million housing units and more than 15,000 community facility projects.

“Small businesses are the backbone of our economy, yet millions of hardworking entrepreneurs can’t access the capital needed to pursue dreams. Small business CDFIs provide critical financing for entrepreneurs starting or growing their businesses, helping them build wealth and create quality jobs. With Mastercard Strive USA’s investment in the CDFI Innovation Initiative, OFN will further develop the infrastructure for these specialized lenders and expand support for more small businesses in underinvested communities across the country. ”

Harold Pettigrew

President and CEO , Opportunity Finance Network

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