This paper puts a corporate finance lens on microfinance. Microfinance aims to democratize global financial markets through new contracts, organizations, and technology. We explain the roles that government agencies and socially-minded investors play in supporting the entry and expansion of private intermediaries in the sector, and we disentangle debates about competing social and commercial firm goals. We frame the analysis with theory that explains why microfinance institutions serving lower-income communities charge high interest rates, face high costs, monitor customers relatively intensively, and have limited ability to lever assets. The analysis blurs traditional dividing lines between non-profits and for-profits and places focus on the relationship between target market, ownership rights and access to external capital. Access the full paper here. Access the brief here.

This Framing Note is the third in a series exploring various dilemmas which policymakers face across several topics of great importance to financial inclusion. In the field of prudential regulation, as in the other areas of financial regulation discussed in the other Framing Notes in this series, policymakers therefore face another manifestation of the regulator’s dilemma: how to safeguard the health of the financial system, while encouraging access to financial services. The latter objective may require that there be a diversity of financial institutions with different risk and cost profiles but it is not easy to supervise numerous diverse entities. The dilemma is especially acute since small savers who have access only to informal often less stable alternatives, may be at greater risk of loss.

The global financial crisis provides a sharp reminder of how weak lending practices not only affect the lives of many people but also can have severe systemic consequences.  However, policies designed to protect may unintentionally restrict the extension of credit, especially to poorer borrowers.  

While the financial crisis provides evidence of the need for greater consumer protection, adding costs and complexity to credit processes may slow renewed formal lending.  Confronted by these growing pressures at a macro-economic level, policy makers and regulators face a “regulator’s dilemma”: how much and how to intervene in credit markets to protect not only those borrowers who already have access to formal credit, but also to protect access to credit itself. At the heart of successfully resolving this dilemma, as in all such dilemmas, is the process of carefully identifying and evaluating the trade-offs involved.

The FAI Policy Note “Consumer Protection in Credit Markets” advocates an evidence-based approach and provides pointers to help policy makers establish a regime of consumer protection appropriate to the state of development of different credit markets and in line with broader national objectives such as financial inclusion.

Using two new datasets, the authors examine whether the presence of banks affects the profitability and outreach of microfinance institutions. They find evidence that competition matters.  Greater bank penetration in the overall economy is associated with microbanks pushing toward poorer markets, as reflected in smaller average loans sizes and greater outreach to women. The evidence is particularly strong for microbanks relying on commercial-funding and using traditional bilateral lending contracts (rather than group lending methods favored by microfinance NGOs).  The authors consider plausible alternative explanations for the correlations, including relationships that run through the nature of the regulatory environment and the structure of the banking environment, but fail to find strong support for these alternative hypotheses.

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This paper explores the implications of voluntary reporting on knowledge of microfinance, using specific data from the MixMarket and the Microcredit Summit. The authors find that while both organizations aspire to provide a broad, global set of data, different trends in the reported data influence our analyses and lead to different conclusions depending on the dataset used.

Access the full paper here.

This paper explores the implications of voluntary reporting on knowledge of microfinance, using specific data from the MixMarket and the Microcredit Summit. The authors find that while both organizations aspire to provide a broad, global set of data, different trends in the reported data influence our analyses and lead to different conclusions depending on the dataset used.

Access the research brief here.

Analyzes the financial data of 245 microfinance institutions to examine the effect of regulation on the profitability and outreach of these institutions.

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Explores the determinants of profitability, loan repayment and cost reduction for 124 institutions and the effect of contract design (lending models) on these indicators.

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Explains the notion of “smart subsidies” and makes a case for their application to increase the scale of microfinance, access to commercial funds and outreach.