- Within the Inter-American Microfinance Forum event, the Minister Luis Felipe Cépedes welcomed Claudio González–Vega, Chairman of the Board of Trustees, and Javier Flores Moreno, CEO of the BBVA Microfinance Foundation, who presented the Chilean government with the Group’s best practices in the area of transparency, corporate governance and technology for the development of the microfinance sector in vulnerable segments.
- The Minister said that “the future of the financial sector in Chile in the medium and long term will tend toward the sophistication of the offer and to experiences that improve the work being done in the specific and still relatively unknown micro-entrepreneurial sector and smaller sized enterprises. It is therefore very interesting for the agenda for the democratization of enterprise”.
As part of the Inter-American Microfinance Forum (Foromic) held this week in Chile, senior executives from the BBVA Microfinance Foundation (BBVAMF) met with Luis Felipe Céspedes, the Chilean Minister of the Economy, and with Alejandra Dagnino, head of the Department for Small Enterprise at the Ministry, to offer the institution’s support to the various initiatives run by the Chilean government in favor of vulnerable entrepreneurs.
Attending the Minister’s offices were Claudio González-Vega, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the BBVAMF, and Javier Flores Moreno, CEO of BBVAMF, accompanied by Pablo Coloma, General Manager of Emprende Microfinanzas and Mario Pavón, General Manager of Fondo Esperanza, group institutions with a presence in Chile.
“The BBVA Microfinance Foundation applies sustainable and inclusive methods to support 1,700,000 entrepreneurs in Latin America, who thanks to their own efforts are emerging or protecting themselves from poverty”, said Claudio González-Vega. “We do so by finding the most effective way to combine the technology, the excellence of corporate governance and transparency with the best practices of local knowledge and close communication with the customer. We believe that our experience of accumulating information and measuring results can be a contribution to Chile for the regulatory advance required by the microfinance sector”.
Javier Flores, CEO of BBVAMF, said: “According to the data presented by the IDB, the microfinance sector serves 20 million people in Latin America. Our Group supports 8% of them. We are following the case of Chile with great interest, as we believe this country has enormous potential to eradicate extreme poverty. But to do so we need to look very closely at the microenterprise sector and generate policies specifically focused on promoting and developing these entrepreneurs, as this is a totally different reality from the medium-sized company. The customers don’t come to our branch offices –we also go to their terrain and we adapt to their needs”.
Luis Felipe Céspedes, Minister of the Economy, summed up the experience of the businesses in the BBVA Microfinance Foundation in Chile and particularly highlighted that institutions like this “are not only granting funding for loans, but are also delivering technical support for very small productive units which often cannot access other types of opportunities”.