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