Founded by EDA Rural Systems (EDA), CapitalConnect (CC) is a new information dissemination and price discovery platform for social enterprise transactions. CC aims to facilitate loans and equity investments by helping institutional lenders, institutional investors and social enterprises find one another. It is not a stock exchange, but provides a common platform for institutional players to interact, potentially resulting in more-realistic market valuations. Participants complete their transactions outside the portal. The service is not currently open to small-scale individual investors.

The management team of CC includes Sanjay Sinha, Managing Director of Micro-Credit Ratings International Ltd (M-CRIL) and co-founder of EDA; Frances Sinha, Managing Director of EDA and Director of M-CRIL; and Aparna Vishwanatham, formerly of rating agency ICRA, an associate of Moody’s Investors Service. The service will be free of charge during an initial three-month period. After July 2008, registrants will be charged an annual fee, the amount of which was not available at publication time.

M-CRIL, an EDA Group company based in Gurgaon, India, reports having completed 480 assessments of microfinance institutions since 1998, primarily in Asia. EDA, established in 1983, provides development-related consultancy, research and capacity building expertise, focusing on microfinance and micro-enterprise. EDA works with organizations in 15 countries across Asia and the Pacific, including over 100 microfinance institutions. Its budget size is not publicly available.