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> Posted by Mary Ellen Iskenderian, President and CEO of Women’s World Banking, and Michael Schlein, President and CEO of Accion, who are Co-Chair and Founding Member, respectively, of the Microfinance CEO Working Group
The following post was originally published on the Microfinance CEO Working Group blog.
As leaders of international organizations dedicated to financial inclusion, we welcome and support initiatives that hold the microfinance industry to the highest standards of client protection, social performance, and pricing transparency. This is the principal reason why the members of the Microfinance CEO Working Group came together – a shared commitment to these principles as well as a shared recognition that enforcing them takes work that none of us can do alone.
When our group first formed in 2011, we scanned the landscape of actors and initiatives working to enforce high quality microfinance industry standards. Chuck Waterfield and MFTransparency (MFT) stood out. Pricing transparency is widely considered the most challenging standard to uphold in our industry, and there was no denying that Chuck and his small but dynamic team had created something unprecedented with MFT.
Publicly reporting pricing information is extremely complicated, which is why all industries struggle with it. The microfinance industry, however, is actually further along than most, and that is largely due to MFT’s efforts. Chuck and his staff developed a methodology to present credit pricing information in a clear and consistent way, so all stakeholders can learn the true price of credit products for clients. As a direct result of MFT’s methodology, microfinance institutions in many countries now report their pricing data. Multiple institutions also reduced their prices after publishing data and determining that they were out of line with other institutions in their market. Since MFT has been operating, many governments have also started to require pricing transparency in their regulation of the microfinance industry.
Michael Schlein, President and CEO of Accion, shares his exhortation for action
Looking back
Two years ago the Citi Foundation convened a group of us to start thinking about Financial Inclusion. We looked around the room and saw all the usual suspects. We immediately realized we needed to broaden the conversation to all the new actors who are coming in, seeing the opportunities, the markets and the need for financial services at the base of the pyramid.
From a Forum to a Movement
That led us on this path to FI2020 and this Forum. I do think we have succeeded in broadening the conversation significantly. It’s not just the non-profits and the microfinance institutions but it is now banks, payment companies, retailers, insurers, government organizations and regulators. It is a broad conversation aligning around a common vision of creating a financially inclusive world.
This is more than a Forum. It has now become a movement with a clear direction laid out in the Roadmaps. There is a lot of energy in this room and we will all leave here and continue to work on driving this vision forward.
Everyone has a role to play
This is an inflection point.
We at the Center for Financial Inclusion have been working hard to get to this Forum. We now have to take stock and think about the future and how to keep this momentum going.
My exhortation to everyone involved in this Forum – in person or online – is help us make this vision real. Everyone has a significant role to play in actually achieving a financially inclusive world.
Read Michael’s latest Huffington Post article, “Tapping an Invisible Market: We Can Make Financial Inclusion a Reality“
To see what others are saying and posting about the Global Forum, visit the Financial Inclusion 2020 website and follow #FI2020 on Twitter.
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