Metrics that Matter: Strategic Financial Tools for CDFI Leadership
Metrics that Matter is a webinar series designed for CDFI CEOs, CFOs, board directors, and bank investors. We cut through analytical noise to deliver practical, easy-to-apply financial frameworks—enabling leadership teams to evaluate complex strategic options faster and deploy resources where impact and sustainability align.
About this Series
In a shifting economic and federal policy landscape, CDFI executives face urgent strategic choices: scaling through partnerships, evaluating M&A, optimizing loan products, or navigating leadership transitions.
Metrics that Matter is a webinar series designed for CDFI CEOs, CFOs, board directors, and bank investors. We cut through analytical noise to deliver practical, easy-to-apply financial frameworks—enabling leadership teams to evaluate complex strategic options faster and deploy resources where impact and sustainability align.
Why Attend?
- For CDFI leaders: Streamline board-level decision-making with metrics and KPIs aimed at managing your business in real time and informing key strategic choices.
- For Bank & Impact Investors: Gain visibility into tools and metrics that enable CDFI partners to better assess financial resilience and manage operational tradeoffs and risk.
This nine-webinar series kicked off with a foundational webinar in August 2026 and will continue through the first half of 2027. The recordings, transcripts and slides from all events can be accessed below on demand.
Recent and Upcoming Webinars
1. Metrics that Matter: Improving Financial Analysis of CDFI Small Business Lenders
Recorded August 2026
The foundational webinar in this series presents a core framework connecting six key financial metrics—normalized across assets under management (AUM)—to clarify and track the key factors and connections that drive net income.
2. Metrics that Matter: Financial Tools for Evaluating CDFI Mergers and Acquisitions
November 10, 2026
This session focuses on using traditional event-based merger analysis tools for the work of CDFIs. It will begin by identifying the potential tangible financial benefits of a transaction and ratios that can be used to quickly build baseline scenarios. From those scenarios, CDFI leaders can explore the financial probability of success and compare that with the intangible challenges such as cultural and mission alignment.
Planned Topics in the Series
- Assessing and Processing Portfolio Acquisitions
- Funding and Implementing Innovation
- Revisiting Financial Analysis Tools with Benchmarks
- Product Mapping Tools: Identifying Partnership and Technology Opportunities
- Measuring What You Do Best (And Cutting the Rest)
- Measuring Revenue Resilience for Leadership Transitions
- Board Tools to Drive Results
About the Facillitators
Joyce Klein
Senior Director, Business Ownership Initiative
Joyce Klein is the senior director of the Business Ownership Initiative, which works to expand the role of business ownership in generating economic opportunity. Ms. Klein assumed the leadership of BOI (formerly FIELD) in 2012, after working as a senior consultant since the program’s inception in 1998. She is recognized as a leading expert on microlending in the US, speaking at national and regional industry conferences and being quoted in a variety of news media, including The New York Times and NPR’s “Marketplace.” Joyce has more than 20 years of experience studying and supporting microenterprise and entrepreneurial development programs in the US, and she has authored or co-authored numerous publications, including funder brief and strategy guides, evaluation and research reports, case studies, and policy briefs. She has also designed and managed grant programs aimed at supporting innovation in the practice of microenterprise development in the US.
Under Ms. Klein’s leadership, BOI launched the Microfinance Impact Collaborative and helped to create the Entrepreneur Backed Assets Fund and the Responsible Business Lending Coalition. A central focus of BOI’s work includes examining the potential role of business ownership and the microenterprise field in addressing the challenges of racial inequity and the racial wealth gap.
Brett Simmons
Senior Advisor, Business Ownership Initiative
Throughout his career, Brett Simmons has gravitated toward difficult problems in need of new solutions and iteration to achieve success. His work has included program design, founding social impact companies, and working at a Fortune 150 manufacturing firm. He enjoys the opportunity to learn and take on diverse challenges. This played out in his education as he completed both an MBA and master’s degree in philosophy of religion (philosophical advice is free)!
About the Business Ownership Initiative
The Business Ownership Initiative, an initiative of the Economic Opportunities Program, works to build understanding and strengthen the role of business ownership as an economic opportunity strategy.
About the Economic Opportunities Program
The Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program advances strategies, policies, and ideas to help low- and moderate-income people thrive in a changing economy.
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Metrics that Matter: Improving Financial Analysis of CDFI Small Business Lenders
From Crisis to Continuity: Optimizing CDFI Capital and Partnerships for Natural Disaster Response
The New Era of Small Business Finance: Access, AI, and Accountability (Highlight reel)
The Changing Role of Small Business Ownership
Main Street Challenges and Policy Solutions
Innovations Driving Small Business Lending Forward: It’s Not All About AI
To Help Small Businesses Recover From the L.A. Fires, Invest in Community Lenders
