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SKS IPO Success and Excess

By market standards, the SKS IPO is a great success. Institutional investors have over-subscribed their allocations by 13 times, and the company’s valuation of USD 1.5 billion came in at the top end of the offer band price.

What Should We Look for with the SKS IPO?

The most important and contentious issues about the IPO will take more time for us all to weigh carefully. It will be particularly important to see how the proceeds of several Mutual Benefit Trusts are used given the philanthropic purpose for which these MBTs were first created.

Virtual Conference: Getting Past the Technology Hurdles at MFIs

Over the past several months, CGAP and Grameen Foundation, with support from the MasterCard Foundation and the EU/ACP Microfinance Programme, hosted a series of four workshops to discuss the back office challenges at MFIs. Workshops took place in Washington, DC, Kenya, India, and Peru in an attempt to understand the issues at both a global and regional level.

India, Microfinance, and Technology

Back office management is a source of such stress for many MFIs that it’s exciting to see MFIs trying new and innovative ways of addressing these issues. Sahayata’s back office strategy includes not only technology, but also people and processes.

Trickle Up: What’s Up Six Months after Graduation?

The Trickle Up Graduation Pilot in West Bengal is one of the most advanced sites in the CGAP-Ford Foundation Graduation Program—a global effort to understand how safety nets, livelihoods and microfinance can be sequenced to create pathways out of extreme poverty.

Managed Chaos: Keeping Track of Agents

The key is pattern recognition. That’s where the color coding, scoring and sortability of FINO’s system comes into play.

Can Branchless Banking Be Distributed Like Coca-Cola?

In India, a single distributor for a company like Coca-Cola (or Airtel or Nestle) works with several hundred retailers who sell Coca-Cola’s products. The distributor is responsible for selecting retailers, managing inventory, picking up/delivering cash and managing paperwork (e.g., for SIM registrations). Is it feasible for a distributor to add mobile banking to the other products they sell?

India’s Doorstep Banking: FINO Starts Something New

FINO agents in Karnataka offer no-frill bank accounts from the State Bank of India (SBI). Some agents also sell insurance products.

CGAP Releases New Research on Banking Agents in India

As part of a new series of research on agents and mobile/branchless banking, this month we started a series of blog posts about recent field visits with some of India’s most prominent organizations that make use of agents.

Mobile Banking in India: Grass-Roots Marketing

A notable difference in the role of banking agents (also called Customer Service Providers or CSPs) in India compared to other countries is that the agents are responsible for customer acquisition in addition to processing transactions.

India: Agent Management to Sort Winners from Losers

The regulatory changes made in India last year have uncorked a stream of new branchless banking launches. Three new providers have or are just about to go to market.

Are MFIs in India Overvalued?

Opportunities for reasonably-valued equity investments still remain, but the majority of recent transactions by foreign-owned funds suggest that finding such opportunities is not necessarily an easy task.

Multiple Borrowing or Multiple Lending and Debt Fatigue

The common thread across locations in which repayment problems have been experienced is that customers are showing signs of fatigue arising from debt.