Social entrepreneur Faisel Rahman founded Fair Finance in 2005 to tackle financial exclusion and high-cost lending in the UK. He has a background in campaigning on issues related to poverty in the UK and in international development with the Grameen Bank and the World Bank in Bangladesh. He created the UK’s first microcredit programme in 2000, which he grew into Fair Finance.

He remains an occasional Guardian columnist, writing about exclusion, and was awarded an Ashoka fellowship in 2007. In 2009 he was recognised as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, in 2014, made an OBE for Services to Community Finance, awarded Honorary Doctorate from the University of East London in 2016, and made an Honorary Fellowship for Social Enterprise in the UK.