Mobile phones, unlike any other technology, have penetrated and affected the lives of ordinary Indians in a very short time.

Undertaking an exercise in learning, I had last month visited BISWA, an MFI based in Orissa, that apart from providing microcredit, is involved in a wide range of activities related to health, education, water, sanitation and livelihood enhancement programs.

The power of finance to transform the lives of the poor is not well understood.

Wealth management is synonymous with high networth individuals and when KGFS decides to call its army of frontline staff ‘wealth managers’, the tag does bring with it power and associated responsibility.

In line with its aim to plug the existing gaps in finance with respect to lending to the Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs), IFMR Capital has started to explore ways to devise an effective and replicable lending model catering to it.

The miracle that microfinance is thought to be was subjected to a randomized evaluation in a study which was a result of a research partnership between MIT and the Centre for Microfinance at IFMR.

Finance is a tool that, when it works well, is designed to help an individual or a firm move resources smoothly across time and across different states of their lives (such as good health and ill health).

A recent mint article on mobile money throws light on what the World Bank in Africa has labelled as a “cornerstone for development” for its potential to mobilize remote rural economies.

Microcredit has spread extremely rapidly since its beginnings in the late 1970s, but whether and how much it helps the poor is the subject of intense debate. This paper reports on the first randomized evaluation of the impact of introducing microcredit in a new market. Half of 104 slums in Hyderabad, India were randomly selected for opening of an MFI branch while the remainder were not.

India is a largely an agrarian society.  Agriculture constitutes 60 percent of employment in this country and the farmers who practice it are vital ingredients to India’s economic fabric.