Case Study: Kiva scales global microloans and accelerates innovation with Salesforce for Nonprofits

Kiva brings new levels of innovation to global microfinance

Kiva is a nonprofit microfinance pioneer that has facilitated over $500 million in loans to more than 1 million borrowers worldwide. Facing the complex task of managing transactions, onboarding lenders, partners and volunteers, multilingual translations, and high-volume customer support with a small engineering team, Kiva needed a scalable way to operate and innovate quickly.

By implementing Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and custom Force.com apps, Kiva built portals and tools to track partners, run risk analysis, manage fundraising and coordinate volunteer translations, while Service Cloud handles 4,000+ support cases per month with sub‑24‑hour response times using just two staff and five interns. The Salesforce-based platform gave Kiva a stable, extensible infrastructure that enabled new partner types and products (like Kiva Zip), increased transparency and faster innovation, and expanded access to capital for underserved borrowers.

Kiva

Matt Flannery

CEO and Co-Founder