By Gary Schwartz, The Mark This is Part 1 in a two-part series exploring the opportunity to service the large unbanked and underbanked population in North America through innovative …
Small Companies, Big Credit Problems
By Matthew Yglesias, Slate Magazine But between the third quarter of 2010 and the third quarter of 2011 (we don’t have Q4 data yet), banks steadily reduced their small-business loan portfolios and the rate at which new business establishments were launched remained way below the …
Why Banks Shun 30 Million Americans
By Tim Chen, CNBC.com Wal-Mart, for example, charges $3 to cash a check between $300 and $1000, and levies a host of fees on the prepaid Walmart MoneyCard. Compared with the average 2 percent to 4 percent charged at most street-corner check cashers, Walmart is generally..
Is Bank of America Trying to Shed Small-Business Customers?
By Robb Mandelbaum, New York Times Back in the fall of 2008, the bank’s then-chairman and chief executive, Kenneth Lewis, called its small-business loan portfolio a “damn disaster.” Since then, that portfolio, as reported to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, has shrunk by…
Commercial programs should not use the term ‘Microfinance’ – Yunus
By Microfinance Focus Microfinance Focus: What is your opinion about what happened at the Grameen Bank? What all factors led to you resignation from Grameen? Muhammad Yunus: This is basically a political problem. Suddenly I was told by the Central bank of the country that I …
MICROFINANCE PAPER WRAP-UP: Latest Findings from Randomized Evaluations of Microfinance
By Jacqueline Foelster, MicroCapital The first part of the paper reviews the results from randomized evaluations that measure the impact of microcredit and microsavings on business investment, business creation, consumption and household welfare. This evidence suggests that …