From the Amsterdam Financial District naar PlusPlus: FD newspaper interview with CEO Peter Heijen

This weekend, December 5, 2020, FD Persoonlijk Magazine published an interview with PlusPlus director Peter Heijen. About ambitions, ideals, and of course, PlusPlus*. Read the full interview below, by Jeroen Bos.

As a child, Peter Heijen was already an idealistic boy who couldn’t stand injustice in the world. He once wrote a letter to then-Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers. The subject: children pulling the legs off spiders. He asked if the Prime Minister could do something about it. It might seem a bit odd that this idealistic little boy would end up working on Amsterdam's Zuidas as a banker twenty years later. His task: providing investment advice to wealthy individuals.

‘It started to gnaw at me,’ Heijen says. Especially after he went backpacking through Bangladesh more than ten years ago. His journey began in the Indian city of Calcutta. ‘Families live on the streets there, mothers with children. That’s distressing and heartbreaking. But in South Asia, there are children living on the streets without their parents. When you see that, it breaks you.’

Back in the Netherlands, Heijen began investigating the problem of poverty as a kind of equity analyst. He graduated as an econometrician, so he also calculated how to scale solutions. His main conclusions were that job creation is the most powerful tool in the fight against poverty. And that these jobs need to be created in SMEs. However, SMEs in poor countries have very poor access to financing.

Pineapple Juice in Benin

‘So I thought, I’ll just start crowdfunding for these SME entrepreneurs in developing countries,’ says Heijen, who had by then quit his job as a banker. ‘This is how Lendahand was born about ten years ago. We offer people the chance to lend money to entrepreneurs and thus contribute to a fairer world and less poverty.’

‘With Lendahand, we’re now lending millions per month, so we’re really making a difference, but we don’t reach the poorest people in rural areas as well,’ Heijen says. That’s why, together with Solidaridad and ICCO, he created a new platform: PlusPlus. Unlike Lendahand, PlusPlus provides interest-free loans. And while Lendahand focuses on fighting poverty, PlusPlus aims to work on food security in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Heijen cites the example of a pineapple juice producer in Benin, who can expand with a loan from PlusPlus.

Heijen gets a lot of satisfaction from his work, although the early years weren’t easy. And, most importantly: ‘It feels good not to close my eyes to the world’s problems but to tackle them.’

*Editor’s note: In 2023, PlusPlus became part of the impact crowdfunding platform Lendahand