Center for Financial Inclusion, Jan 7, 2021
In 2010, when the world was going through the largest economic crisis in three generations, the microfinance sector found – in most cases for the first time – that it’s not immune. The sector’s many stakeholders, very few of whom had previously experienced a major crisis, had to learn on the fly. Seeing this knowledge gap – and also recognizing an opportunity – CFI launched Weathering the Storm, a first-of-a-kind research project to capture the experience of MFIs dealing with crisis.
With the onset of COVID-19 came a scramble for direction on how to respond, and, amid the hubbub, the first Weathering the Storm made the rounds on social media as one of the reference materials for this new crisis. Many of its lessons — admonition to MFIs to “keep leverage low and liquidity high,” focus on prioritizing client and staff confidence, emphasis on maintaining transparency with creditors — proved as true in April 2020 as they did a decade ago. Indeed, its discussion of creditor responsibilities helped inform the rapid and well-organized response by social investors.
Even so, it wasn’t a perfect fit. Much of the original Weathering the Storm focused on institutions whose crises were due more to internal mismanagement than to external threats — a situation that is largely reversed today. And most of that study focused on avoiding a crisis rather than surviving one – hardly appropriate advice to institutions facing a pandemic. Recognizing these differences, CFI — this time in partnership with e-MFP — launched Weathering the Storm II to seek out cases that are more relevant to today’s situation.
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covid-finclusion, Apr 28, 2020
Liquidity has been foremost on the minds of just about everyone in the financial inclusion sector. Several essays on this site have delved into the topic. The first article in our liquidity series outlined three drivers for illiquidity: deposit withdrawals, operating costs, and maturing debt, and argues that maturing debt presents the greatest risk. But what does the data say? Here we will dig into that, and investigate just how severe the different elements of the liquidity crunch are to different categories of MFI around the world.
We don’t have access to sector-wide data reflecting the situation right now. Nobody does. But we can get a good view of what may be happening from historical data collected by MIX Market over many years. Let’s start with the most basic question. Assume an MFI is operating under complete shutdown, with no repayments, no new disbursements, and no other inflow or outflow of funds – it’s operating entirely from cash reserves. How many months would it be able to survive before the money runs out?
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covid-finclusion, Apr 20, 2020
In our first piece in this series – Keeping the Patient Alive – Adapting Crisis Rubrics for a Covid World, we introduced the analogy of the emergency room doctors trying to treat a critically ill patient – a financial services provider (FSP), its staff and clients in lockdown or socially distancing, unable to travel and with incomes collapsing, health expenditures increasing, and some sick or dying. Repayments are close to impossible, and new loan applications are flat. But operational expenses continue, and it’s a race against the clock.
In short, this patient is critical. To continue the analogy, ensuring the reciprocal trust and confidence of staff and clients and investors is like treating a patient’s organs, with interventions from pharmacology to surgery to transplant. We’ll get to that, though. For now, the challenges need triage. The patient can’t breathe, so she cannot oxygenate and circulate her blood. This, to come back to our institution, is the critical need for liquidity.
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covid-finclusion, Apr 14, 2020
In 2010, the Centre for Financial Inclusion (CFI) published a paper by Daniel Rozas called Weathering the Storm, reviewing 10 MFIs that faced existential crisis, some having survived and others not. The paper was written in the aftermath of the 2007-08 global financial crisis and its subsequent ripples across many microfinance markets.
Today the sector is facing a crisis both broader and deeper than anything that’s come before. It is not alarmist to say that the threat – to clients, their business, financial service providers and the whole ecosystem that supports them – is existential.
In recent weeks, there has been a cacophony of responses as different stakeholders try to get a grip on what’s happening and what comes next. We’re mindful not to add to the noise without adding value. The value, we think, is in extracting just the applicable lessons from previous crises, matching them to the complex array of challenges being faced today, and doing so within the framework of an illustrated guide that takes that CFI paper as its starting point. So to this end, the European Microfinance Platform (e-MFP), CFI and the Social Performance Task Force (SPTF) are launching a collaborative blog series that will try to help practitioners, investors and other stakeholders weather this storm.
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next billion, 14 April 2020
The COVID-19 pandemic has generated a real sense of crisis in inclusive finance, surpassing even the reaction to the 2008 financial crash a decade ago. And particularly among investors, the topic of highest concern is the looming crisis in liquidity for financial institutions.
For microfinance institutions (MFIs) in many countries, the combined effects of the pandemic and its economic impact will lead to high levels of non-performing loans (NPLs), as clients struggle to make their scheduled payments. During past crises, the typical impact on MFIs has been a period of retrenchment. Much of this is likely to be repeated: With slowing trade and economic activity, fewer loans will be made and portfolios will shrink. The combined effect of credit losses from the NPLs and a shrinking portfolio will put serious pressure on equity capital, quite possibly threatening MFIs with outright insolvency, and ultimately, losses to investors.
But a financial institution can simultaneously be insolvent and still liquid, and in a crisis, preserving MFIs’ liquidity must take precedence over maintaining their solvency. To understand why, it’s important to explore the two concepts, and how they’re likely to impact MFIs and their investors as the current crisis progresses.
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e-MFP, 20 October 2016
This week marks Financial Inclusion Week. In support of this effort to highlight what Financial Inclusion means for the Platform, e-MFP would like to highlight the work being done in Cambodia by its members and partners, including ADA, BIO, FMO, Incofin, and Proparco, as well as by the MIMOSA Project.
From its beginnings as a hotbed of NGO activity to one of the world’s most active microfinance markets today, Cambodia has always traced its own path in the sector. A decade ago, access to finance in Cambodia was minimal. Today, the Cambodia Microfinance Association counts 2 million loans outstanding for a population of 15 million, along with a growing number of deposit accounts, remittances, and other financial products. The Symbiotics MIV 2016 survey reports Cambodia receiving nearly 10% of microfinance investments in the world, second only to India – a country whose population is nearly 100 times larger.
What happens in Cambodia affects across the entire microfinance sector. And on that front, Cambodia is once again tracing its own path. more →
MIMOSA, 10 May 2016
Some lessons are unexpected. Back in 2000, during the height of internet stock craze, I was an amateur manager of a small stock fund consisting of 8 smalltime shareholders who were all my relatives. Being a bit of a contrarian, the fund focused mainly on biotech stocks, which were enjoying quite a strong run, even if not quite as exuberant as dotcom stocks. The fund did well – a roughly 250% return over 3 years, but as always, the lesson was not from this relative success, but from a far larger failure – the missed opportunity to bank a 750% return.
One stock stands out in my mind: Incyte Pharmaceuticals, which I had bought variously when it was trading in the $10-$20 range during 1998-99. By early 2000, it had crossed $100/share and was rapidly heading higher. At the time, I was well aware that there was no fundamental reason behind this runup – it was classic speculation. The question was when to sell? Internally, we had set a target of $150 (at a time when it was nearing $140 and rising rapidly). It was not to be. We sold some weeks later when it had slid down to the $60s…
Call me greedy and stupid. But I learned my lesson – I’m not made for stock trading! More importantly, it was my first introduction to the dangers of inexorable growth, which creates expectations that are difficult to reset and that far too often lead to disaster. more →
MIMOSA, 20 January 2016
Since publishing the first MIMOSA report – on Cambodia – I’ve heard one persistent critique. We say that the market is saturated, yet none of the current indicators appear to support it: repayments are great, there’s no field evidence of widespread overindebtedness, and the major MFIs are all undergoing a process of Smart Certification. How can we assert that Cambodia is at risk of overindebtedness, let alone a credit crisis, when no other indicators seem to support it?
These are important and reasonable questions. But here’s the rub – all the factors that point to a healthy market are either lagging indicators or are too vague or too poorly understood to be used as benchmarks. more →
e-MFP, 19 Jun 2014
You know the game of musical chairs: players sit on chairs arranged in a circle. The music starts and the players start circling – dancing, running – while chairs are progressively removed. Then the music stops and chaos erupts as the players seek to find a place to sit.
In Mexico, the number of chairs remaining is few indeed, even as the MFIs continue to dance. The recently published study by the Microfinance CEO Working Group has shown just few chairs are left. More →
CGAP, 7 August 2013, co-authored with Emmanuelle Javoy
When you hear the word “Mimosa,” you might immediately think of the refreshing champagne cocktail. But now the MIMOSA – the Microfinance Index of Market Outreach and Saturation – also has relevance to financial inclusion. In brief, the MIMOSA is a simple way of measuring microfinance market capacity, an important complement to the approach described in a recent blog in this series by Annette Krauss and her colleagues from the University of Zurich. The key difference in the two approaches is that they work from entirely opposite starting points. more →
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