Trust Me

One thing that has never come easily to me is trust.  Trusting people with my personal information, trusting people to follow through.  I would rather just not give them the chance to let me down, to disappoint.  But trust has managed to weasel its way into nearly every important element of our lives.  Even the one-dollar bill says In God We Trust.  The value of money itself is based in trust.  We don’t have gold reserves anymore.  Just think about capitalism… it’s trust.  Trust in those we don’t even know, those who don’t know us.  But society wouldn’t function without it.

I arrived at this rant about trust because of a current debate I’ve been following in microfinance.  SKS, now India’s largest MFI, announced an initial public offering  just over three months ago.  Compartamos, an MFI in Mexico, has been publicly traded for years, but this is still a big step, and possibly an indication of where the microfinance industry is headed.  From what I’ve gathered it boils down to a couple main points of contention: Does commercialized microfinance imply exploitation and/or mission drift?

The benefits of being an aggressively for-profit MFI are evident: SKS reports an annual compound growth rate of 165% since 2004.  That represents millions of poor people who now have access to financial services, and women who have been empowered.  Furthermore, because SKS has reached such a large scale, they have been able to utilize their unique distribution channels to strike special deals with other for-profit companies to offer products such as cell phones, water purifiers, and sanitary pads to the poor at drastically lower prices.  Things they wouldn’t otherwise have access to; things I take for granted every day.

So what’s all the fuss about?  Microfinance is about helping the poor help themselves, giving them access to capital, formal savings products, life insurance, things ordinary banks have denied them for centuries.  Its mission is based solely around the best interest of the borrower, the client, the poor.  With commercialization, new major players are introduced: stakeholders (and not just the clients themselves as in Grameen Bank).  Profits no longer solely go back to the borrowers, but out to other stakeholders.  Is this pushing the industry towards loan sharking and profiteering?  Will short-term investor needs overshadow long-term strategy and dedication to the needs of the poor?

Thus far, I say no.  Going public has helped SKS achieve significantly greater outreach, better and more diversified products and services, and they are now under the ever-critical public eye.  Governance must be more transparent.  But once again it’s a matter of trust.  SKS is an extremely powerful institution that could easily, I mean easily, exploit the poor.  In a big way.  So do we say it’s not worth the risk?  Or do we trust them, and ourselves, to put the right people in charge and stay true to microfinance’s mission so that this life-changing industry can continue to grow? 

It’s not an easy decision.  Trust me.