Over one hundred representatives of major multilateral organizations and institutions in the sector gathered in Santiago de Chile at a meeting convened by the BBVAMF within the Inter-American Forum on Microenterprise (Foromic), whose theme this year is “The future of financial inclusion”.
As part of the Inter-American Forum on Microenterprise in Chile, attended by leading experts from the most important international institutions in the microfinance sector, the BBVA Microfinance Foundation (BBVAMF) organized a discussion on the opportunities and challenges in the sector.
Over one hundred representatives from multilateral organizations, social impact investment funds and microfinance institutions were present at the event, including the Chilean Ministry of the Economy, the Banking Superintendency of Peru, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), FOMIN, the International Finance Corporation (World Bank), FAO, Inter-American Investment Corporation (IIC), Latin American Development Bank (CAF), CGAP, Responsibility Investments, Mirovest, FMO, Bolivian Investment Management, KIVA, OMTRIX, GAWA Capital, Triple Jump, Bankable Frontiers, the Colombian Association of Microfinance Institutions, and the heads of microfinance associations in Bolivia, Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Peru and the Dominican Republic, the Boulder Institute of Microfinance and BancoEstado de Chile.
Javier Flores Moreno, CEO of the BBVAMF, described the scale of the progress achieved by the Foundation’s Group, which promotes the methodology of Productive Finance. According to data presented by the IDB at this edition of Foromic, the microfinance sector currently serves 20 million people in Latin America, and the BBVA Microfinance Foundation has 8% of that client portfolio.
“We are facing major challenges down the road. We need to increase our scale and our scope so our value proposition guarantees our customers’ development and progress; we need to make the most of all the possibilities offered by technology to be in closer contact with our customers and obtain more and better information about them; we need to improve our processes, strengthen our system of corporate governance, improve efficiency and tap into the synergies we have as a Group. The Foundation is working towards these goals, and we look to the future with hope”, said the CEO of the BBVAMF.
For his part, Claudio González-Vega, Chairman of the Board of Trustees, noted that the Foundation is currently supporting the home-based enterprises of 1,700,000 entrepreneurs in Latin America, who –thanks to its efforts– are emerging or protecting themselves from poverty. The Group’s working model seeks to effectively combine modern information and communication technologies, excellence in corporate governance, transparency and best practices for managing knowledge and measuring results, and close communication with its customers, as exemplified by all the local branch offices in the seven countries in which the Group is present. All this activity is possible thanks to the commitment made by BBVA eight years ago, when it set up the Microfinance Foundation with the aim of extending the offer of financial services to people who were excluded from the institutional system in the region.
The event convened by the BBVAMF highlighted a variety of different innovative experiences by companies in the Group, such as rural and agricultural funding services via technological platforms, the technological mobility project for credit advisers, financial literacy initiatives and the promotion of savings, the implementation of several joint projects with the IDB, and a plan to fund improvements in the productive homes of entrepreneurs in vulnerable sectors.
This event, in combination with other contributions by representatives of the BBVAMF in Foromic, its presence in the Chilean media, and the opportunity to meet with the Chilean Ministry of Economy, all serve to reinforce the image of the BBVA Microfinance Foundation as an expert in Responsible Productive Finance in benefit of its customers, and the fact that their businesses lie at the heart of all its activities.