Winner of the Go Global MBA Scholarship 2024 by educations.com

Meet Pisacha (Bow) Poopipathiranyakul, the winner of the Go Global MBA Scholarship 2024!

Pisacha Poopipathiranyakul is the winner of the 2024 Go Global MBA Scholarship by educations.com. She has been awarded $7,000 towards her tuition for an MBA in Entrepreneurship at Stanford Graduate School of Business in the USA.

Pisacha is a management consultant at Bain & Company based in Thailand. She is passionate about improving financial accessibility to underbanked consumers who are vulnerable to predatory lenders. Pisacha's vision is to use her MBA to innovate fintech solutions that will enable low-income communities to achieve financial freedom.

Pisacha’s Background

Pisacha grew up in Thailand, where she accompanied her father, military doctor, and traveled to remote villages. There she witnessed people living in low-income communities taking “quick” loans and their further dependance on paying it off. Returning to these villages annually without seeing any change, Pisacha decided to study financial literacy to help people to leave the depth cycles.

Pisacha completed her undergraduate degree in Business and Environmental Economics & Policy at UC Berkeley. During her undergrad studies she entered the business club, where she served as a Vice President, initiating a consulting project to create user-friendly tools for young adults to evaluate credit cards.

After college, she moved back to Thailand to specialize in financial services in developing markets. Her work at Bain centers around expanding access to low-interest microfinance products and affordable insurance throughout Southeast Asia. Beyond her consulting career, Pisacha is also a Product Innovation Lead at startup, where she developed user-centric fintech products.

How Pisacha chose her country of study

While Pisacha has had meaningful engagements in Southeast Asia, she realized that the fintech industry there is very nascent. Therefore, she decided to pursue her MBA degree at Stanford Graduate Business School to unite her passion for financial inclusion with expertise in technology. The university is also located in the heart of Silicon Valley and has extensive courses on entrepreneurship. It will help Pisacha to learn enough to reach her goal: through internships build expertise in fintech and eventually make financial opportunities more accessible to vulnerable communities.

Beyond immersing in a multidisciplinary education through Stanford's curriculum, Pisacha is also eager to gain tangible hands-on experience in the tech capital of the world to ensure that she has well-rounded capabilities to become a startup founder in the future.

How Pisacha plans to become a globally-minded leader

Pisacha plans to spend her time in MBA crafting her fintech product offerings through Stanford's entrepreneurship lab alongside like-minded classmates, connecting with potential investors, and interning at a cutting-edge fintech firm to learn industry best practices.

Using her MBA experience as a launchpad, Pisacha's goal is to return to Southeast Asia with a product that not only ruthlessly battles predatory lending, but also fundamentally reshapes the distribution of money and wealth. 

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