Trends
Regarding regulation and supervision
- The competencies of monetary authorities with respect to the supervision of institutions involved in microfinance will continue to grow. The insufficient capacity of some of these bodies in relation to the high number of institutions under their responsibility may result in some supervised institutions running into difficulty.
Regarding products and services
- he range of products and services will grow as a natural evolution of the market in countries with a more developed industry, and on occasions in countries which are at an earlier stage; in these cases, basically on the initiative of cooperation bodies. We are likely to see developments in relation to non-banking products such as micro-insurance and services like remittances, and to a lesser extent, products such as financial leasing and the like. However, turning them into mass products and services does not appear feasible in the short term, where products like credit and savings will continue to set the trend.
- The products and services of Islamic microfinance will continue to be a marginal percentage of the offer of financial services to microenterprises. However, we are likely to see initiatives involving this kind of product in countries with a significant Muslim population, as is the case of Algeria or Nigeria, among others, in tune with the incipient trends recorded in other regions like Asia and the Near East.
