Last week in Istanbul I attended a really interesting meeting of a number of IFC clients dubbed "Brick by Brick: Achieving Scale in Extending Technology Enabled Access to Finance". The main purpose of the event was for IFC's clients to learn from each other, and the agenda was dominated by their presentations of their initiatives...for me, it was an eye-opening update of how far we've come in what technology can do, and how much is relevant to SME Finance. We will try to make as many of the presentations as possible available through the Forum (we are just checking with the authors on this), but here are some previews of what I hope will be coming:How Bank South Pacific goes into the small farmer supply chain through tablets, cards and F-Pos...How just when you thought nothing could go below micro-finance Tiaxa brings "nano-credit" to the market! and what it might mean for SMEs.How TEB Bank (Turkey), already profiled here for non-financial services for SMEs, also innovates in the electronic payments space, vital to continued market share in their competitive market.and more...overall I came away amazed at how many new wrinkles are being tried, and how some things of which I was a bit less certain, like crowdfunding, already are driving ahead in emerging markets. more to follow soon...for now , check out http://www.tiaxa.com/about-us/who-we-are-and-what-we-do/ - I know what they're doing now is not SME, but this "nano-finance" could take on a whole new potential if combined with a way to connect the data not to phone numbers only, but also to real peoples' IDs...matt
