Research Methodology

Africa's Times of News, provided insights to the IFC estimation that Africa’s finance gap for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) stands at $331bn. Micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) form the backbone of most African economies and investment in this sector will significantly enhance job creation and wealth development. The informal sector contributes 38% of sub-Saharan Africa GDP yet 51% of the continent’s 44m formal MSMEs lack the finance necessary to grow. The true scale of the shortfall is almost certainly even greater given the lack of data.

Medici examines the widening financial gap in India and their lack of push for institutional credit for consumers. With consumer debt to GDP at only 17 percent, India falls behind major economies of Asia Pacific.

According to the article, “In the absence of institutional credit at fair interest rates for a majority of the population, people at the bottom of the pyramid are left devoid of opportunities and fail to be included in the financial system.”

Key contributing factors to this issue of financial inclusion include:

The vision of affordable lenders is that everyone should have access to affordable and appropriate credit, delivered in a fair, respectful and responsible way. Affordable lenders are typically social purpose lenders, such as responsible finance providers and credit unions.

This report is based on information gathered in the GBA’s Women’s Market Analytics Survey — the only collection of global banking data measuring the performance of financial institutions serving the Women’s Market, with four years of performance data and over 400 data points per institution. This second edition of the report bears out several trends that emerged in the previous edition, highlighting the strong business opportunity the Women's Market represents.

Nielsen and Alipay jointly issued the 2017 Survey: Outbound Chinese Tourism and Consumption Trends, which details how Chinese tourists pay for products in services and their behaviors in making such decisions. Ninety-nine percent of Chinese respondents have the Alipay app installed on their phones.

MEDICI's Diwakar Mandal shares the factors of a strong economic growth, rising interest rates, and a growing digitization in the lending space by the emergence of alternative lenders that have been key drivers of growth in SME lending. He says, banks have traditionally been a custodian of customer relationships in the SME lending space.

The Economic Times review of the Economic Survey 2017-18 says that the amount of credit or loans disbursed by banks amounted to Rs 26,041 billion as on November 2017, but 82.6% of this was pocketed by large enterprises. For millions of SMEs in the country, banks only lent out 17.4 % of the total credit. Learn more about the survey and how MSME climate in India as well as analysis of the report and the pitch for peer to peer lending as a solution for India's MSMEs.

Incofin Investment Management, a Belgian fund management company, and the Netherlands Development Finance Company (FMO), a public-private development bank founded in 1970, recently signed the fourth capacity development agreement stemming from their partnership that was launched in 2008 to strengthen a total of 14 microfinance institutions (MFIs) worldwide.