Downloading - Microfinance Information Exchange
Downloading - Microfinance Information Exchange
Downloading - Microfinance Information Exchange
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From the Editor<br />
The tenth edition of the MicroBanking Bulletin<br />
marks the beginning of a new era for our publication.<br />
Thanks to the continuing contributions of a<br />
number of organizations to our data set and the reorganization<br />
of our data management systems, we<br />
are now able to incorporate trend analysis into our<br />
benchmarks. This might not seem revolutionary,<br />
but it is.<br />
While the MicroBanking Bulletin has always prided<br />
itself on being the premier source of benchmarking<br />
in the industry, those benchmarks were derived by<br />
looking at any one annual report within the most<br />
recent two years, re-classifying the information into<br />
accounts that could be compared and adjusting that<br />
data to account for subsidies that were not directly<br />
observable on the financial statements. Since the<br />
data set from one MicroBanking Bulletin to another<br />
varied with each edition because of the composition<br />
of contributing institutions, the Bulletin was not always<br />
helpful in discerning trends from year to year.<br />
Other factors such as low process automation for<br />
handling the data and occasional re-interpretations<br />
as to how specific accounts needed to be classified<br />
as time evolved also made the task of incorporating<br />
year to year trends daunting.<br />
Well the mountain has been climbed. With the cooperation<br />
of the 60 contributing MFIs in this edition,<br />
we were able to organize and clean data from 1999<br />
to 2002 while also investing in the automation of our<br />
data processing systems. While both procedures<br />
took longer than we ever thought they would, we<br />
are happy to report that the new data set, Trend<br />
Lines, is now available as an important tool that we<br />
will be able to regularly update.<br />
The revolution is not so much in what we are now<br />
able to do with the data, however, as how all of us<br />
in the community of microfinance practitioners, investors<br />
and analysts will be able to use the data;<br />
and that is to help us understand the trends relative<br />
to the important questions of our day. How long<br />
does it take a new MFI to get to financial selfsufficiency?<br />
Do we see economies of scale occurring<br />
as MFIs grow? What happens to the composition<br />
of an MFI’s client base as it ages or its services<br />
mature? We believe that Trend Lines will be an<br />
important tool in exploring these questions and we<br />
hope you do too.<br />
Didier Thys<br />
MIX – <strong>Microfinance</strong> <strong>Information</strong> eXchange, Inc.<br />
MICROBANKING BULLETIN, MARCH 2005 1