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>Posted by Deborah Drake, Vice President and Program Manager, CFI
The following post by Deborah Drake was recently featured in the Corporate Governance and Microfinance series on the CGAP Microfinance Blog. The post highlights the release of this year’s Microfinance Banana Skins report, “Staying Relevant,” providing background on the annual Banana Skins report series and an overview of this year’s edition. In investigating the series’ subject of risk in the microfinance industry, this year’s report found a pressing importance on managing corporate governance risk.
The post begins:
This year’s Microfinance Banana Skins is aptly titled “Staying Relevant.” The fourth in the series, each year the Banana Skins report reflects not only the perceptions of industry actors but stands as a commentary on the evolution of the microfinance sector itself.
From the inaugural survey “Risk in a Booming Industry” (2008) to “Confronting Crisis and Change” (2009), and “Losing its Fairy Dust” (2011) to this year’s report, David Lascelles, survey editor, has provided us “a reading of the tea leaves” of how transformations in the industry show up in the way industry players perceive risks. This year’s report shows how much new players and other external forces are disrupting the once-comfortable microfinance community. New players such as mobile network operators and commercial banks are increasingly serving low income clients. MFIs are dealing with the impact of changing and increasing regulation. Lascelles comments that “these results tell us that microfinance will need to adapt to remain relevant in a much more difficult marketplace.” This should give all of us food for thought and inspire us with a sense of urgency.
>Posted by Center Staff
The following post by Alexandra Fiorillo and Louis Potok, the vice president and an analyst at ideas42, respectively, was recently shared on the CGAP Microfinance Blog. The post presents the field of behavioral research as an important tool for informing consumer protection policy. Some policy-relevant research in the areas of information presentation and transparency has already been conducted, but there remains the need for additional investigations as well as strategic policy implementation, the authors assert. The post begins:
Behavioral economics is the science of human decision-making and how people’s biases and weaknesses can lead them to make harmful economic decisions. Behavioral research in consumer finance can help improve financial consumer protection. As Rafe proposed in the first blog post in the series, if we want to design policies that improve consumers’ outcomes in the marketplace, we need to understand their choices and motivations.
Some policy-relevant behavioral research has already begun…
Read the rest of the article on the CGAP blog.
Have you read?
Progress toward Improved Client Protection in the Indian Microfinance Sector
An Excellent Resource on Regulating Client Protection: IFMR Trust’s Blog Series
> Posted by Center Staff
The recent release of the Global Findex marked a crucial step towards global full financial inclusion. In a post on the CGAP Microfinance Blog, CFI’s Managing Director, Elisabeth Rhyne, discusses the importance of this financial inclusion database for providing demand-side data and allowing service providers to better understand client needs.
The post begins:
With the release by Gallup and the World Bank of the Global Findex (Financial Inclusion Index), the path to financial inclusion has just been made a little easier to travel.
Last year we (the Center for Financial Inclusion) asked practitioners, investors and others to tell us about the biggest “Opportunities and Obstacles to Financial Inclusion”. They identified “Limited understanding of client needs” as the fourth-ranked obstacle and “Improved demand-side information” the tenth-rated opportunity. The availability of data from the Global Findex will go a long way to satisfy those needs, and if data is as important as our respondents believe, it means that a significant constraint to inclusion is starting to give way. Read the rest of this entry »
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