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> Posted by Susy Cheston, Senior Advisor, CFI
Almost three decades ago, I walked into a meeting with a loan officer at a major bank in Boston. I was running a not-for-profit dance company that was well-respected, had good governance, and had a decent business plan—but hey, it was a not-for-profit dance company with no endowment and no certainty of surviving beyond its next show. We were not a good risk on paper. My job was to persuade the loan officer to give us an unsecured line of credit based solely on our business plan and his judgment of our ability to execute against that plan. He looked at our financials, but he also sized me up. This was not data analytics, this was the old-time community bank model of a decision based on a hand shake and a relationship, a sense of trust. Truth be told, the loan officer was biased in our favor. He really loved our work and believed in what we did. That plus a few well-placed board members had gotten me in the door where a company with a similar balance sheet and risk profile would have been left out in the cold.
A few years later, I landed in El Salvador where I formed lending groups among poor, illiterate women in the relatively early days of microfinance. “Ella es buena paga” was the phrase the women used to identify someone who was known as good for paying her debts. It meant that when a vendor in the marketplace or the owner of a corner store let a customer buy something on credit, she was good for it. On the basis of a reputation as “buena paga,” the lending group would allow a woman to join them. Needless to say, those who were known as “mala paga” would be blacklisted and not permitted to join the group.
Perhaps the greatest microcredit miracle of the last century was that, thanks to these lending groups, poor women who were credit invisible were revealed as credit worthy, identified as such through social relationships and their standing in the community. It was the kind of relationship-based credit decision that I and our dance company had benefited from in Boston, but that people at the base of the pyramid had always been excluded from.
> Posted by Kaj Malden, Consultant, PlaNet Finance China
For China’s young microfinance sector, which could benefit from more regulatory oversight and transparency, ratings have the potential to catalyze healthy growth. Efforts to incorporate ratings throughout the country’s market, however, have so far been largely ineffectual. A new report from PlaNet Finance China and Planet Rating, The Role of Microfinance Ratings in the Sustainable Development of China’s Financial Inclusion Sector, part of PlaNet Finance and Credit Suisse’s “Microfinance Robustness Program”, outlines how ratings could provide welcome growth and strengthening for Chinese microfinance, and describes the current obstacles that stand in the way.
Mainstream ratings systems evaluate creditworthiness of debt and financial products for companies. They also contribute to setting benchmarks for the wider financial services industry. Specialized microfinance rating agencies evaluate some of the same qualities traditional rating agencies do, but they are trained in microfinance and investigate other financial inclusion-specific indicators, such as social performance. Microfinance ratings function as institutional ratings, not credit ratings, as in the case of mainstream ratings. These more nuanced ratings for the microfinance sector first emerged in Latin America, where microfinance boomed in the late 1990s.
> Posted by Allyse McGrath, Senior Associate, FI2020, CFI
Once in a while, we in the Accion D.C. office gather in our state-of-the-art movie theater (a.k.a. conference room) for some collective viewing. Now that the World Cup has ended, this viewing has a lot less to do with fútbol and more to do with our day jobs. Last Friday’s feature was a recently-released documentary that highlights those who are left behind by the U.S. financial system. Spent: Looking For Change follows four households who represent the quarter of American households that are underserved and held back by the current financial system.
The film focuses on how families with precarious financial and economic lives end up using services like check cashers, title loans, and payday loans – the tools that those without bank accounts or with poor credit must rely on in the absence of affordable and accessible financial services. In one example, a former nurse and single mother had to stop working to care for an incapacitated family member. She turned to title loans to pay the bills and when she couldn’t keep up the loan repayments, the title company repossessed her car. Another family, which took out one $450 payday loan, is now stuck in a cycle of high interest rates and hidden fees because the family’s income is not high enough to pay off the debt altogether. Each narrative helps us understand why, in 2012, underserved Americans spent an estimated $89 billion on interest and fees.
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