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Displaying all posts under the topic of Customer Protection
February 14, 2013
What’s Next: Another Repayment Crisis?
It's been over two years since the start of the great India insolvency. Four years since the Bosnia blight and No Pago Nicaragua. And nearly six years since the Morocco microfinance meltdown.
At this point, it's reasonable to say that the first global crisis in microfinance has passed. Life is on the mend.
February 8, 2013
What's Next? Connecting Finance and Health
Focusing on financial access can sometimes obscure the rationale for doing so. We don’t really care about access to finance for its own sake. The point of providing quality financial services to poor households is to give them an easier, more stable path to prosperity. But what are the pitfalls and slippery spots on that path that we hope to ameliorate?
January 22, 2013
What's Next: Financial Access in 2013
The microfinance space has never been a dull place. As the tumult of the last few years—debates about effectiveness, industry crises and crashes in several countries—seemingly dies down, it’s a good time to speculate about what’s next. It seems clear that “business as usual” in terms of rapid growth and expansion paired with unvarnished enthusiasm and uncritical praise is not what’s next.
So what is?
October 2, 2012
Highlights of David Roodman's Microfinance Open Book Blog
David Roodman’s conversation with Jonathan Morduch is coming up tomorrow. If you haven’t read David’s book yet, you should. But we can be realists. You probably don’t have time to buy and read the whole book in the next 36 hours. So, here’s a quick cheat sheet of some highlights from David’s blog over the past few years. Reading these posts will get you up to speed (but you should still read the book!).
September 26, 2012
What It Takes To Make Electronic Payments Better Than Cash
I attended the Better than Cash Alliance launch this week at the Ford Foundation. The alliance’s goal is to accelerate the transition from cash to electronic payments in developing countries. For a good overview of the process, benefits and challenges of the transition, see this white paper from Bankable Frontier Associates (which is one of our partners in the US Financial Diaries project...
September 14, 2012
Managing the Difficult Trade-offs in Microfinance Regulation
A few weeks ago M-CRIL, an Indian microfinance ratings firm, published a white paper on India's evolving microfinance regulations. The overall message is that while the proposed regulatory framework is improving, it still needs work. One particular point caught my eye:
July 20, 2012
Links We Like
We haven’t posted an update on stuff we’ve been reading for quite some time. So, here’s a round-up of some to the articles, blogs and papers we’ve been reading.
I recently welcomed the news of a new national-level microfinance bill in India. I believe the Indian microfinance sector is witnessing a movement towards greater regulatory clarity following the turmoil of the Andhra Pradesh crisis.
Over the past few years, U.S. lenders and credit bureaus have become enchanted with the notion of alternative credit scoring—the process of looking at non-traditional accounts to determine a person’s creditworthiness.
October 20, 2010
Kate McKee of CGAP on Microfinance Client Protection
Questions of fairness and consumer protection in finance do not always have clear answers. The consumer’s perspectives on transparency, fair treatment and rights are at least as important (and much less well-understood) as the provider’s, and yet banks need to cover costs and achieve repayment if they are going to build sustainable businesses. How can the needs of both sides be balanced? Is it realistic to expect MFIs and their associations to protect clients, or is outside “enforcement” needed, whether through regulation or investor pressure?