Understanding the Opportunities and Challenges of the Market_5 doc

GRI calls itself the “de facto global standard for reporting” and claims over 1,500 businesses and other organizations as users. 1 Included in its active list are more than 60 banks and financial institutions, including a number of banks that appear in this book: ANZ Bank, Banco Bradesco, Citibank, and Deutsche Bank. The GRI may one day fulfill its aims, but it still has a long way to go before it becomes a widely recognized and used global standard. The GRI approach sensibly cuts through some of the greatest difficulties in social reporting. To cope with variation in social goals from one company to another, GRI allows each company to select the indicators it will report from a long list of possibilities. It provides guidance on a process for defining appropri- ate indicators with reference to key stakeholders. It supports the differentiation of goals by providing industry-specific supplements—lists of proposed indicators that are especially relevant for certain types of industries. A proliferation of indi- cators arises from GRI’s attempt to incorporate not just corporate citizenship goals, but to respond to every variety of social purpose, a thankless task. Its finan- cial sector supplement, now under revision, is considering a proposed list of indi- cators that addresses financial inclusion concerns. The GRI also attempts to make sure that its process is more than just a public relations exercise. It requires that each reporting company provide narrative statements on social goals and strategies, as well as an explanation of how social-performance indicators are used in corporate management and governance. A major challenge for the GRI and other social reporting frameworks is to make their reports useful to stakeholders. Ideally, reports would be pored over by management, board members, and investors. Customers, employees, media, and community leaders would read them, too—at least the executive summary. Unless social reports provide information that is compelling for these stake- holders, they will not add much genuine accountability. At present, however, there is so much flexibility that a company can present a glowing picture by selecting only indicators it scores well on. If a company wants to use GRI as window dressing rather than take a serious look at its social performance, it can. GRI is among the best processes available for measuring corporate citizenship, but it remains flawed. The Equator Principles The Equator Principles get one step closer to inclusive finance. They were created by the International Finance Company and World Bank, which joined leading financial institutions to create voluntary guidelines for project 160 • Microfinance for Bankers and Investors Measuring the Social Bottom Line • 161 finance. Project finance loans provide funding for major new installations such as power plants or factories, which are often controversial, especially on environmental grounds. The Equator Principles are social and environmen- tal screens applied by financial institutions before approving project finance loans. 2 More than 60 leading financial institutions have signed on to the Equa- tor Principles and the governing process that maintains them. These princi- ples cover the environmental impact of businesses financed, prohibit the financing of certain socially detrimental businesses (vice, weapons), and examine labor practices (no sweatshops or child labor). Efforts are under way, for example, by the Dutch development bank FMO to apply the same type of guidelines to inclusive finance. These efforts run straight into the problems of scale and informality that characterize most of inclusive finance. Microenterprise loans are too small to allow for individual policing, and the informal family businesses of the self-employed do not con- form to formal-sector labor standards. Using the Equator Principles to measure the social value of inclusive finance is like putting on a shoe on the wrong foot. Social Assessment for Inclusive Finance When we move beyond corporate citizenship to strategic social goals for inclu- sive finance, we find recurring themes that allow some common measurement. The shoe may be a slightly better fit, but still far from perfect. One of the best approaches is happening inside the GRI, which is consid- ering a set of financial inclusion indicators within its general financial-sector supplement. Some of the indicators proposed are: • Physical location of branches and customer service points • Outreach to marginal populations, including low-income, disabled, and disadvantaged population groups • Customer satisfaction among these groups • Responsible lending practices and investment advice (following proconsumer policies) • Financial literacy efforts • Product range (microfinance, remittances, community investment) 3 These indicators focus on the basic questions: whom do you serve and how well do you serve them? This is a common sense approach. It avoids the thorny issue of ultimate impact, which we will address later. It includes a combination 162 • Microfinance for Bankers and Investors of quantitative, objective indicators (people and products) and qualitative, sub- jective indicators (customer satisfaction, consumer protection). Counting Clients Counting clients is the single most important measure for institutions serious about inclusive finance. It is so basic that it almost goes without saying, and it is also dead easy to track. Microfinance institutions have long measured their success first by the number of active clients and second by some indi- cation of how poor those clients are, usually using average loan size as a proxy. Mainstream financial institutions, however, prefer to track monetary volumes. Information technology can easily provide information on clients, sliced many ways, but habits of mind among managers and analysts are slow to change, and these indicators still lag in most financial reports. Progress Out of Poverty Index Counting clients does not give you much information on who a provider is reaching. One way to go deeper is to conduct periodic surveys of client socio- economic status. The microfinance community embarked on a collective effort to develop ways to measure client poverty, coping with the absence of hard data on incomes and assets. 4 Some of the microfinance organizations most devoted to reaching the very poor have incorporated the resulting poverty data in their client intake process. The Grameen Foundation, for example, has developed the Progress out of Poverty Index (PPI), a set of 10 questions that predict whether a family is very poor. 5 Given that poverty measurement is easily mired in academic com- plexity, a simple approach is essential if a tool is to make a difference in real life. Grameen has taken the detailed work of many researchers to devise this index, one of the most user-friendly poverty measurement tools now available for inclusive finance. Loan officers apply the index when they sign up new clients and periodi- cally thereafter, determining whether a family has moved out of poverty over time. The PPI asks about children, schooling, housing, land, energy use, employment, and consumer goods. Questions are tailored to each country, because while these elements are fairly universal indicators of poverty, they show up differently in each location. In Pakistan, the PPI researchers found that ownership of a motorcycle was a good predictor of a family’s status, while in Bolivia furniture and telephones turned out to be better predictors. It should be noted that what the PPI does not do is measure the impact of financial services on clients. Social Ratings Another approach, which recognizes the institution-specific nature of social goals, and skirts the lack of consensus on how to measure poverty, is the social rating. Social ratings examine an institution’s processes, essentially asking whether the institution has credible ways of pursuing its stated social aims. ACCION International’s social assessment framework, the “SOCIAL,” attempts to incorporate both the generic corporate citizenship issues with finance-specific issues, all placed in the context of the company’s own goals. Other specialized microfinance raters, such as M-CRIL and MicroRate, are walking a similar path. These ratings are highly subjective, however, which makes it difficult for them to set up comparative scoring. At present they are more useful as management tools than as ratings that speak clearly to investors and other external stakeholders. Impact Ultimately, we would like to know whether financial inclusion makes people better off. This is the question of impact. Clients do not use financial services as ends in themselves, but to achieve other goals, like higher income, financial security, or a better standard of living. The impact question is particularly important for public donors and philanthropists who must decide whether to donate to inclusive finance or to something else—like primary education or rural roads. The question also matters for socially responsible investors. Microfinance investment vehicles like those described in Chapters 9 and 14 need evidence of social impact to report to their own investors. Triodos Bank, for one, has made major efforts to get the microfinance banks in which it invests to join the GRI. Impact is the hardest nut of social-performance monitoring, because of the problem of attribution. With tools like the PPI, lenders can tell whether loans are reaching the poor, and even whether the poor are becoming richer. But they cannot attribute changes to the use of financial services. What if the economy was growing, and as a result everyone’s income grew? What if the family’s daughter moved to America and began sending remittances? How do we know whether the loans made a difference? Measuring the Social Bottom Line • 163 Formal studies that academics recognize as having sufficient statistical rigor to address attribution require control groups and measurement over time. The “gold standard” for impact evaluation, according to statisticians, is a random- ized control trial (RCT), modeled after clinical drug tests and championed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Poverty Action Lab. Clients are ran- domly assigned to the treatment group (a loan) or the no-treatment group. If there is a statistically significant difference in outcomes between the groups, we infer that the loan made the difference. RCTs are expensive and time con- suming, costing as much as $1.5 million and requiring years to complete. Moreover, this approach only demonstrates impact in virgin territory where no other service providers operate. Anthropologist Ann Dunham Soetoro, better known today as Barack Obama’s mother, dealt with this problem as far back as the early 1990s, when she worked for Bank Rakyat Indonesia. She saw that it was uninteresting to find out whether a loan from BRI had more impact than a loan from BKK, a provin- cial loan program. 6 When clients already have access to credit from another provider, it is impossible to construct a meaningful no-treatment group. Qualitative studies are much more revealing. While quantitative studies zero in on a few key numbers, qualitative studies can provide a rich picture of how financial services affect clients. Such techniques—including focus groups, in-depth interviews, and other market research tools—help explain how impact happens, and at the same time provide useful insights for improving products and service delivery. Organizations like MicroSave and Microfinance Oppor- tunities and projects like the Financial Diaries provide guides to adapting mainstream market research techniques to bottom-of-the-pyramid clients. The Best Measure Is Face-to-Face I want to end on a personal note by recommending an entirely unscientific approach to social indicators: visiting clients. Business executives who wish to develop a deep understanding of their market, and at the same time to increase their motivation to pursue social aims, can do nothing more impor- tant than talking with clients in their homes and workplaces. Each of the clients described in the beginning of this book is a real person whom I met and whose story moved and inspired me. I think back to them time and again when considering what paths make sense for building the inclusive-finance industry. Listening to clients puts the two bottom lines in proper perspective. 164 • Microfinance for Bankers and Investors Cases 1 BANKING MODELS This page intentionally left blank ICICI BANK: SHAPING INCLUSIVE FINANCE IN INDIA I CICI Bank is the tiger of Indian finance. Launched in 1994, ICICI sprang quickly into the arena opened by India’s financial-sector liberalization. It helped to awaken the sector from a decades-long slumber and bring it into the twenty-first century. Capitalizing on policy changes throughout the 1990s that eased restraints on private-sector banking, ICICI has grown until it is poised to become India’s first global bank, with branches in 20 countries. 1 Among many firsts in Indian banking, ICICI was first into the market with ATMs and today is the largest issuer of credit cards. Though it is sometimes criticized for aggressive practices, 2 India is deeply indebted to the bank’s creative and energetic competition. It is hard to imagine India’s economic boom taking place without it. In inclusive finance the story is the same. ICICI’s outsized ambitions out- stripped many competitors. It adopted a goal of placing $1 billion into micro- finance. 3 However, ICICI was not well-positioned for direct delivery of financial services to low-income clients; it needed an outsourcing strategy. This came in the form of the partnership model for the provision of credit, and the banking correspondent model for savings and payment services deliv- ery. Implementation of this strategy required ICICI to collaborate with micro- finance institutions (MFIs) across the country, and the resulting interactions between the bank and MFIs changed the sector significantly, helping it grow and develop. • 167 • Toward an Inclusive-Finance Vision The government of India and the World Bank created ICICI as a public- sector industrial development bank in 1955, when the financial sector was almost completely nationalized. For the next several decades there were no Indian private banks, only government-owned banks and a few international banks serving foreign companies. In 1994, as India was starting to open the way for private banking, ICICI decided to launch a deposit-taking commer- cial bank. In 2000, the bank was privatized through a listing on the New York Stock Exchange. Today, ICICI’s assets make it the second largest bank in India (State Bank of India, a public-sector bank, remains the largest), and the second largest listed company in India by market valuation. At the close of the 2008 fiscal year, the bank had 4.9 billion rupees ($121 billion) in total assets, 1,255 branches, and 3,881 ATMs throughout India. 4 First Steps Two major considerations, one external and one internal, motivated ICICI to move into inclusive finance. Externally, ICICI faced the Reserve Bank of India’s priority-sector lending targets, requiring all banks to place 40 percent of their loans in agriculture and “weaker sections” of the population. Despite priority-sector lending targets, the Reserve Bank of India states that up to 41 percent of the country’s adult population still lacks a bank account. 5 Internally, ICICI’s aspiration was to become “the largest provider of finan- cial services in India with a ubiquitous presence,” 6 and that ambition encom- passed all market segments, including the bottom of the pyramid. ICICI may also have wished to counteract critiques of its consumer finance operations, whose collections practices are a favorite target of the press. Like other Indian banks, ICICI’s first steps into microfinance involved women’s groups as promoted by the government’s Self-Help Group Bank Link- age Program. In this model, which is successfully used by public-sector banks throughout the country, an NGO or agent helps women form self-help groups (SHGs) that are then “linked” to banks first with group savings accounts and eventually through group loans. By 2001, ICICI had about 10,000 microfi- nance clients through the SHG model, an insignificant number in the Indian context. 7 Bank decision makers regarded the SHG program as unscalable, at least for a bank like ICICI, whose retail outlets addressed the better-off mainly in urban areas, and whose staff was likewise oriented toward the middle class. 168 • Microfinance for Bankers and Investors ICICI’s managers saw that the bank did not have the right attributes for a direct- to-BOP strategy and decided to develop different approaches. Microfinance institutions offered an alternative route with greater scale potential and a better fit to ICICI’s capabilities. At the time, there were an increasing number of MFIs, but only a handful had achieved significant scale. ICICI loaned funds to some of these MFIs, but was unable to lend as much as targeted due to a lack of MFI creditworthiness. Even the best MFIs were seriously undercapitalized, and only a few had solid financial performance tracking. ICICI’s desire to solve this constraint inspired its first important con- tribution to inclusive finance in India—the partnership model. ICICI’s Partnership Model: Changing the Terms of the Sector In 2002, ICICI launched a partnership model in which it lends directly to microborrowers, using MFIs as loan originators and collection agents. The MFI receives a fee for acting as ICICI’s agent. In order to ensure that incentives are aligned and that the MFI will have an interest in maintaining a good portfolio, the MFI must provide a first loss default guarantee to ICICI (generally financed through a loan from ICICI). Operationally, the partnership model was nearly invisible. For a woman borrowing from the MFI, nothing significant changed. She remained in the same group with the same loan officer, going to the same weekly meeting. She might not even have noticed the only difference—her loan documents now said that her lender was ICICI rather than her familiar MFI. The partnership model solved several problems. ICICI did not have to be as demanding about assessing the creditworthiness of the MFI as it would if it were lending to the MFI rather than to the client. It did not have to be as strict regarding internal processes, governance, capital structure, financial management, etc., as long as portfolio quality was satisfactory. This focus on portfolio quality, which was consistently excellent in most Indian MFIs, allowed ICICI to proceed despite the often glaring deficiencies of the MFIs in professionalizing their institutions. ICICI could assist MFIs to profession- alize as their partnerships deepened. For their part, MFIs did not have to worry about raising equity, as the loans did not appear on their books. MFIs that were previously held back by lack of equity could now grow at a much faster pace, and grow they did. ICICI Bank: Shaping Inclusive Finance in India • 169 [...]... it expands to neighboring countries Operational Lessons The experience of Credifé provides a number of lessons on the practical and corporate culture challenges of integrating microfinance operations into a bank High-Level Support and Governance A key factor in the success of Credifé was the existence of an internal champion in the bank, and other strong supporters From the beginning, one of the bank... threshold The commission was calculated on the basis of expected interest income generated by the microfinance portfolio, less the cost of funds, expected provisions, and the cost of services provided by the bank The fee can be reviewed from time to time, but in the meantime the bank absorbs short-term fluctuations in the cost of funds, provisioning, and its services, while the service company absorbs the. .. corners of the country, Banco Postal staged a formal opening for one of its most remote branches, in Santa Rosa do Purus, deep in the Amazon basin on the Peruvian border While the event was directed at the press (and hence full of lofty sentiment), the remarks made on the occasion reveal the importance of such access to this isolated settlement of about 2,000 people One of the senators called the opening... of the bank’s overall strategy K.V Kamath, CEO of ICICI Bank, speaking as cochairman of the 2008 World Economic Forum, called inclusion the top issue of the day “To me the main issue is inclusion How do you include the masses living in the poorer continents of the world into the mainstream economy? If we can achieve that, we will have done a lot to improve the world we live in.” Kamath stated that the. .. 1970s and 1980s, with periods of high inflation that required banks to develop sound fiscal management Brazilian banks are efficient and offer a full range of financial services The banking sector is comprised of public, domestic, and foreign banks, and is prudently regulated by the central bank Brazil is also known for one of the greatest income-inequality gaps in the world According to the World Bank, the. .. and Investors The partnership between ICICI and Spandana Sphoorty Innovative Financial Services demonstrates the dramatic effect of the model Spandana, established in 1998 in Andhra Pradesh, entered a partnership with ICICI in 2003, initially for 500 million rupees in loans Spandana’s borrower base increased from approximately 35,000 at the outset of the partnership to over 1 million at the close of. .. opening “a symbolic act of national integration, of social inclusion and consolidation of citizenship.” The town’s mayor described practical benefits, including the municipality’s ability to pay government employees and collect taxes, as well as the ability of retirees to receive their pensions without having to travel “Besides helping the local economy, the opening of the Banco Postal, and its technology,... particularly for the equity they needed to leverage conventional debt Equity deals at Share, Spandana, and SKS (see the Sequoia-SKS case) during 2006 and 2007 were prompted in part by the end of the partnership program However, ICICI found other avenues for financing the bottom of the pyramid ICICI Bank: Shaping Inclusive Finance in India • 171 Investing in Inclusive Finance by Creating MFIs and Developing... warehouse Farmers live on the loan proceeds and sell their produce when they choose rather than right after harvest when crops sell at their lowest prices ICICI is promoting the establishment of derivatives trading surrounding commodity-based finance, furthering the ability of farmers to hedge their risks 172 • Microfinance for Bankers and Investors Using Technology to Reach Every Corner of India ICICI aims... sections of the city Clients are attracted to the ability to borrow from Swadhaar and at the same time open and operate savings accounts with ICICI On the other hand, some MFIs have been reluctant to use FINO devices, fearing that ICICI will gain access to data about their clients and woo them away Additionally, ICICI is in the process of encouraging the creation of a shared banking-technology platform that . tell whether loans are reaching the poor, and even whether the poor are becoming richer. But they cannot attribute changes to the use of financial services. What if the economy was growing, and as. a deep understanding of their market, and at the same time to increase their motivation to pursue social aims, can do nothing more impor- tant than talking with clients in their homes and workplaces vision well beyond the financing of existing MFIs. The real- ity in India is that there are not enough MFIs to serve the unbanked in the country. As of 20 05 there were about 15 large MFIs, but