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The tumultuous journey of Bharat Financial Inclusion
Bharat Financial Inclusion, formerly SKS Microfinance and India’s first listed microfinance firm, faces a potential merger with IndusInd Bank, which some experts say is the only way for its survival.
- Categories
- Uncategorized
- Region
- South Asia
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Nestlé, Telenor Microfinance Bank partner to launch digital lending for farmers in Pakistan
Under this program, Telenor Bank has been disbursing loans to dairy farmers digitally. The bank has pioneered one of the country’s first data driven digital method in deciding the loan limits with near instant loans. Hence, the loans are disbursed directly to the farmers via Telenor Bank’s mobile banking platform, Easypaisa mobile wallets.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Investing, Technology
- Region
- South Asia
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Making a Case for the Business Case: New Ways to Provide Sustainable Financial Services to Low-Income Communities
The high numbers of people who participate in informal savings groups is appealing to financial service providers – there are hundreds of thousands of active groups whose self-selected members save weekly for a year, and share their accumulated savings – but it's not easy to tap into this market commercially. BFA recommends using a business case modeler to help acquire low-income people as customers in a sustainable way.
- Categories
- Finance
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Rural Financial Inclusion: Small Finance Banks Could Pick up Where Public Sector Banks Left Off in India
While the demonetization tsunami sorely hurt the microfinance industry, Bandhan Bank offers a good template for what MFIs can do after acquiring banking licenses.
- Categories
- Uncategorized
- Region
- South Asia
- Tags
- lending, microfinance
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Fixing Financial Inclusion’s Gender Gap: Fast-Growing ‘Community of Practice’ Seeks Solutions
One billion women living in the poorest 40 percent of developing-country households remain outside the formal financial system. A persistent gender gap in developing countries in account ownership rates suggests that efforts at financial inclusion are not reaching women. In an effort to change that, CGAP recently launched the Women’s Financial Inclusion Community of Practice to bring together practitioners, funders and policymakers.
- Categories
- Finance
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Behind Credit Suisse’s foray into microlending to the global poor
In its early days, Grameen Bank put microfinance on the map by making tiny loans to communities of female small-business owners who put social pressure on one another to repay the loans. Microfinance has come a long way since then. Today, data-enabled microloans are made to small-business owners, farmers and consumers all over the world, often through smartphones and loan officers wielding iPads.
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- Uncategorized
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The Long Game: How Developing Countries Can Get Microfinance Right
In developing economies such as Myanmar, microfinance is often viewed as a means for lifting people out of poverty. As of 2015, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) comprised 99% of the country’s businesses, and many of those are micro-businesses.
- Categories
- Uncategorized
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Return on Equity for Indian Microfinance Companies to Turn Negative in FY 2018, says Rating Agency
The rating agency expects net interest margins for micro finance companies to decline to 80 to 100 basis points. Operating expenses are also likely to increase due to investments to be made on information technology and collections infrastructure by most players.
- Categories
- Uncategorized
- Region
- South Asia
- Tags
- microfinance
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