How do you solve the biggest, hardest problems in the world? Usually, we just don't. They persist. Today, though, we live in an age that's putting powerful new technologies into our hands, opening up ways to make seemingly impossible solutions suddenly, theoretically, possible – if we can put them to use.

These are the challenges that get taken up by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In financial services, the foundation's goal is to achieve full financial inclusion by bringing all the excluded people in the world's emerging markets into the formal financial system… thereby unlocking massive gains in human wellbeing, everywhere.

My guest today is a leader in that work. He is Kosta Peric, the foundation's Deputy Director of Financial Services for the Poor, and in this episode, he talks to us about the art of how to do this uniquely difficult type of problem solving.