The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) today signed its first investment in the Tunisian financial sector, by providing a €40 million loan to BTK for on-lending to micro, small and medium sized-enterprises (MSMEs).
The loan is part of a financing package with BTK that also includes a US$ 10 million trade finance line, which is expected to be signed shortly.

At the Case Foundation, we believe good data on both financial and social returns is critical to scaling impact investing. So we were encouraged to see two reports released this fall that provide new insights on promising financial returns from a range of impact investments. The first provides data from the KL Felicitas Foundation that shows that returns from its impact investments generally rose and fell with the market. The second, from InSight at Pacific Community Ventures, CASE at Duke University, and ImpactAssets, provides a number of examples of funds that enable investments across a range of asset classes and with varied risk tolerance, and that provide positive social and financial returns.

Not long after Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi professor-turned-banker who has been called the father of microcredit, founded Grameen Bank, close to 97% of his small loans were going to poor women. Women have been the focus of his efforts ever since. Why women? I wondered when I first met Yunus in 1994 while in Bangladesh on an assignment for UNICEF. From my recent conversations with Yunus and years of research for my book about his initiatives to end global poverty, Twenty-Seven Dollars and a Dream How Muhammad Yunus Changed the World and What It Cost Him, I have identified 5 reasons why Yunus concentrates his microcredit efforts on women.

More than five years after the financial crisis of 2008, small businesses in advanced economies are still struggling to secure credit from banks. The combination of this trend with the rapid growth in social networking has resulted in the emergence of a new funding stream -- 'crowdfunding'. Although this new form of non-bank lending is not seen as a threat to the traditional banking system, it does signify a serious alternative to traditional sources of finance for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs).

2013 was a momentous – perhaps even an historic – year for financial innovation and inclusion, and it has left us primed for a fascinating 2014. Here are seven questions raised by some of 2013’s biggest developments that could resonate in the coming year and beyond.

Global Banking Alliance for Women newest member in Latin America, Banco BHD, has a 15% share of the Dominican market, soon to reach 20% once its merger with Banco Leon is complete.

Acess to financial services has been expanding steadily as many countries have been adopting national strategies to achieve financial inclusion. (Financial inclusion strategy is defined as “road maps of actions, agreed and defined at the national or subnational level, that stakeholders follow to achieve financial inclusion objectives.”) Yet large gaps and hurdles to access financial systems remain worldwide. (See female percentages with bank accounts at formal financial institutions in 2011 based on the World Bank’s Financial Inclusion Data.)

These gaps and obstacles are especially arduous for women, for no reason other than their gender! The Findex survey, for example, shows that women refrain from opening personal accounts because they rely on their relatives’ accounts. The Global Financial Development Report of 2014 links this matter to the income inequality and the quality of the economic institutions.

In our last blogpost for 2013, ACCA’s senior economic analyst, Manos Schizas, talks about trying his hand at lending directly to SMEs – and watches one of his borrowers fail.
I was extremely pleased to host ACCA’s Alternative Finance conference back in March 2013. It was an opportunity to showcase some of the most innovative finance providers in the UK, and it was exciting to see professional accountants work out the implications of their offering for themselves and the businesses they worked for.
But here at ACCA’s SME Unit we’d like to think we’re not all talk, so I have since opened accounts with a number of peer-to-peer consumer and business lending platforms, and have recently started to invest in the latter in earnest. As part of a wider portfolio of loans, I recently bought sixty pounds’ worth of the debt of a company that I shall call Space Odyssey Ltd (not their actual name of course). This may not sound like much but P2P platforms and elementary finance textbooks both stress that it’s important to diversify when investing, and I sure am glad I did in this case.

The Western Balkans Investment Framework and the EBRD’s Local Enterprise Facility are joining forces to provide an additional €300 million of financing for small and medium enterprises across the region.

The future of the Nigerian banking industry largely depends on the capacity of institutions in the sector to compete in the retail and small and medium enterprises (SMEs) lending space, a report has stated.
In fact, the report argued that “the future of banking is set to take a dramatic turn.”
Afrinvest Securities Limited stated this in a report titled: “Nigerian Banking League: The Fate of Small Players.”