Thank you for joining us these past couple of days to share your thoughts on improving the use of technology at MFIs. We’ve seen traffic on the site soar so I know there are a lot of people out there struggling with the same issues and I hope you learned something or will at least walk away with some food for thought.

A lot of people mentioned that technology investments don’t receive enough attention by MFI management. Perhaps part of the reason is that the term “technology” is so all encompassing that it becomes overwhelming to even think about. But by deconstructing the challenges into these four themes, I think we’ve started to make progress on what we as an industry can do to help MFIs move past the current status quo.

We started on Tuesday by discussing skills and staff capacity with Carol Caruso from Triple Jump Advisory Services. Many people noted that training is too often a one-off event, and that anything related to MIS is often left exclusively to the MIS or IT teams. Getting more staff involved, and offering training (formal and informal, as Tiphaine Crenn mentioned) on an ongoing basis would be a great improvement. Designing systems that will work for the institution starts with open and ongoing communication between the IT and operations staff, so each needs an understanding of the other to make things work. There was a lot of consensus on the need for more attention to training, but Carol’s question of how to convince MFI management of this still lingers! Thoughts welcome…

We also talked on Tuesday about business processes with Jorge Perez-Luna from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. MFIs too often neglect to document their business processes, resulting in inefficiencies and missed opportunities to streamline processes and reinforce controls. It was suggested that a simple tool to help guide MFIs through the process would be useful. But the case must first be made on why business process mapping is essential in the first place. Are there any such documents or case studies already out there?

The conversation moved on Wednesday toward business models, led by Monica Brand of Accion. Do we need new ways of serving the many small institutions which exist today? Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and hySaaS (hybrid service-as-a-service as coined by Jiten Patel) offer alternative approaches to the traditional licensing model used by most MFIs today. We’ve seen the success of SaaS in the broader financial services industry, but how will this translate to the microfinance sector? Is there sufficient volume to make this a viable market for providers? Are MFIs willing to standardize to the degree necessary to make this a reality?

We also discussed standards on Wednesday with Scott Gaul from MIX and Drew Tulchin from Social Enterprise Associates. Normand Arsenault provided several possible areas for standardization including, prudential reports, management reports, financial reports, and loan tracking reports. Edward Cable from Grameen added social performance measurement to the list.  The topic of standards, in fact, made an appearance in each of the other three themes as well. Is standardization really the key to all of this, as Eamon Sculling suggests?

Comments on this post will remain open so I invite you to continue the conversation.