Latin America Needs More Digital Microfinance Entities

Microfinance institutions in Latin America face major historical challenges, such as actively advancing financial inclusion of vulnerable groups, creating more formal jobs, or establishing more relevant credit systems that help countries develop more competitive businesses.

These challenges take place in a new context that envisages deep-impact solutions, but also threatens to do away with the traditional way of doing and understanding business: digital transformation.

Faced with the emergence of new technologies and new socio-economic dynamics, microfinance entities must adapt and understand the values of digital transformation, and especially what experts call Customer Centricity, a concept that urges businesses to place the customer at the center of all operations.

To this end, CAF—development bank of Latin America—organized a three-day workshop that brought together 10 microfinance entities from Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Panama and Costa Rica to offer them tools to help them effectively implement a customer-based digital transformation.  

Four microfinance institutions will be selected during the workshop for a consultancy that will include a digital diagnosis around user experience and internal processes. The digital maturity of each microfinance will also be assessed, and a detailed action plan will be developed for each of them.

“Financial resources for micro and small enterprises are a very important factor in boosting productive ecosystems and productivity of existing businesses, and creating new business opportunities. In this sense, microfinance needs to be fully integrated into the logics of digital transformation to help our entrepreneurs achieve their goals and improve their competitiveness,” said Juan Carlos Elorza, Director of Productive and Financial Development at CAF.

With this workshop, participants from microfinance entities will receive the necessary tools to understand digital trends for digital transformation, design and launch a customer-based transformation strategy, and build actionable capabilities for transformation.