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• Interest Rate Transparency in Brazil: Addressing Cultural Questions

  Published on March 30, 2010

  

  Brazilians, as I’ve learned from having lived in the Northeast of the country over the past several months, love credit. Common are the signs sitting in most São Paulo storefronts that advertise the interest rate of products by the “vez”. The number of “vezes” or “aprestações” is the number of months across which the full price of a product can be divided, giving the consumer the number of installments in which one is allowed to pay for a good that can range from a car to a cellular phone to a t-shirt to a plate of beans and rice.

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  Countries: Brazil

  Category: MFTransparency Blog

  Tags: Regulation & Policy, Understanding Prices

• MFTransparency Receives Ford Foundation Grant to Promote a Fair and Transparent Microfinance Industry in Latin America

  Published on March 22, 2010

  

  MFTransparency has received grant from the Ford Foundation to promote fair and transparent pricing in the microfinance industry in Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia and Ecuador. The effort, known as the Transparent Pricing Initiative, will launch later this month.

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  Countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador

  Category: MFTransparency Blog

  Tags: Pricing Initiative

• New Research from World Bank Highlights Tradeoffs in Microfinance

  Published on March 19, 2010

  

  Asli Demirguc-Kunt, a chief economist at the World Bank, recently posted an article entitled “Microfinance: Dream versus Reality”. Her post provides an overview of the tough tradeoffs faced by microfinance institutions: between serving the poorest clients and achieving financial sustainability (and profitability).

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  Category: MFTransparency Blog

  Tags: Investments, Regulation & Policy, Responsible Finance

• MFTransparency presents at the Sa-Dhan National Microfinance Conference, Delhi

  Published on March 17, 2010

  

  In March 2010, MFTransparency presented at the Sa-Dhan National Microfinance Conference in Delhi, India. The theme of this conference was ‘Financial Inclusion and Responsible Microfinance. View the presentations here.

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  Countries: India

  Category: Presentation

  Tags: Industry Event

• Transparency at the Consumer Level

  Published on March 15, 2010

  

  Over the last few weeks, I have been reviewing the Global Financial Education Program led by a strategic partnership between Microfinance Opportunities and Freedom from Hunger. The Financial Education Curriculum is targeted at households below and just above the poverty line in developing countries. So far, I have focused my review on the core curriculum which consists of five modules: budgeting, debt management, savings, bank services and financial negotiations.

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  Countries: Mexico

  Category: MFTransparency Blog

  Tags: Financial Education

• Transparency, India, Gandhi, and the Seven Deadly Social Sins

  Published on March 11, 2010

  

  A few weeks ago I made an unplanned and very interesting trip to India. MFTransparency had no plans of working in India this year, but a broad group of stakeholders in the India microfinance industry had been discussing the need for pricing transparency and then invited us to come and meet with them.

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  Countries: India

  Category: MFTransparency Blog

• Mobile Banking and the Future of Transparency

  Published on March 9, 2010

  

  Mobile banking is defining modern microfinance. Within the space of a few short years it has exploded to become a hot-button issue in the microfinance community, especially because of its potential to reach the unbanked.

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  Countries: India

  Category: MFTransparency Blog

  Tags: Consumer Protection

• Calculating Interest Rates Using Newton’s Method

  Published on March 5, 2010

  

  Today I’m going to demonstrate how to write a computer program that is as accurate as Excel 2007’s XIRR function. This article is likely to be of less broad interest, but it provides transparency into how we will calculate interest rates for future data collection trips; and it may be useful for MFIs that wish to automate interest rate calculations for a larger data set than can be handled with Excel.

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  Category: MFTransparency Blog

  Tags: Understanding Prices

• Calculating Interest Rates with Excel

  Published on February 24, 2010

  

  Chuck Waterfield and Alexandra Fiorillo, MFTransparency’s CEO and VP respectively, have been doing many presentations about how interest rates can be calculated using our excel tool, but we haven’t yet featured a story on our blog about our data collection process and our corresponding excel tool. Although technical, interest rate calculations are really at the heart of MFTransparency’s mission and calculating accurate interest rates is vital to providing transparent pricing data.

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  Category: MFTransparency Blog

  Tags: Understanding Prices

• Indian NBFCs Microfinance Network MFIN to assess their transparency level, sources

  Published on February 22, 2010

  

  Microfinance Focus: Microfinance Institutions Network (MFIN), a newly formed body of NBFC-MFIs in India has decided to carry out an in-depth study of the status and level of transparency in its network members and suggest measures to improve the situation, if required, said sources in the industry.

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  Countries: India

  Category: External Media

  Tags: Consumer Protection, Responsible Finance, Understanding Prices