Six years ago the microfinance industry viewed its clients as a given. The general attitude among many of the experts was that 'we have the products, demand is unlimited and the clients will come'. Experts saw clients as statistics, measured in terms of repayment and repeat borrowing rates. Clients entered the discourse, if at all, through impact assessments that were largely the domain of the donors and researchers. These two partners formed an alliance: donors funded the impact assessments, researchers performed them. Microfinance institutions (MFI) and their clients were the objects of these studies but they were rarely owners of the results.
Today, much of this has changed. The microfinance agenda is now increasingly client or market driven. Much of the current interest in clients is driven by the industry's focus on competition and dropouts. Competition, together with MFI policies of requiring clients to take increasingly large loans each cycle, has tempted some clients to take out multiple loans, to assume too much debt and at times end up defaulting on some of their microfinance credit. Dropouts have raised operational costs, a situation few MFIs can afford.
As a result, new attention is being given to clients and products, how to attract and keep clients. As this market-driven microfinance agenda emerges, its component elements are taking shape. While the client-product nexus is important, it is only part of the agenda. It also includes linkages between clients and institutions and the client's financial landscape. Thus, we can discern three levels which define the new framework: the client, the institution and the market.
* The client-product nexus cuts across the issue of customer access to appropriate products and services. The agenda moves from one in which the institutional approach to clients was 'catch as catch can' to a market focus with specific products attracting particular market niches. * Institution-client linkages differentiate between the internal need for mechanisms to provide institutions with a client database that can be used for product development, marketing or service delivery and the larger question of what the appropriate institutional mechanisms are for serving large underserved markets like
This article is a US Government work and is in the public domain in the USA.