More on the debate on microcredit profits

The microcredit revolution has brought with it many banks looking only to make profits. Some microcredit institutions charge interest rates of 80 percent or more, and some of those may even be a partners of Kiva or ebay's Microplace.

Muhammad Yunus recommends that microcredit banks only charge interest rates 10 to 15 percent higher than the cost of raising the money. But some microcredit banks that working for social good say that is even too low. Sometimes the costs of making many small loans to many people demand that you charge higher interest.

A very good article explores this debate in today's New York Times. For our snippet we have this introduction to the article written by Neil MacFarquhar.

“We created microcredit to fight the loan sharks; we didn’t create microcredit to encourage new loan sharks,” Mr. Yunus recently said at a gathering of financial officials at the United Nations. “Microcredit should be seen as an opportunity to help people get out of poverty in a business way, but not as an opportunity to make money out of poor people.”

The fracas over preserving the field’s saintly aura centers on the question of how much interest and profit is acceptable, and what constitutes exploitation. The noisy interest rate fight has even attracted Congressional scrutiny, with the House Financial Services Committee holding hearings this year focused in part on whether some microcredit institutions are scamming the poor.

Rates vary widely across the globe, but the ones that draw the most concern tend to occur in countries like Nigeria and Mexico, where the demand for small loans from a large population cannot be met by existing lenders.

Unlike virtually every Web page trumpeting the accomplishments of microcredit institutions around the world, the page for Te Creemos, a Mexican lender, lacks even one testimonial from a thriving customer — no beaming woman earning her first income by growing a soap business out of her kitchen, for example. Te Creemos has some of the highest interest rates and fees in the world of microfinance, analysts say, a whopping 125 percent average annual rate.

The average in Mexico itself is around 70 percent, compared with a global average of about 37 percent in interest and fees, analysts say. Mexican microfinance institutions charge such high rates simply because they can get away with it, said Emmanuelle Javoy, the managing director of Planet Rating, an independent Paris-based firm that evaluates microlenders.

“They could do better; they could do a lot better,” she said. “If the ones that are very big and have the margins don’t set the pace, then the rest of the market follows.”

Manuel Ramírez, director of risk and internal control at Te Creemos, reached by telephone in Mexico City, initially said there had been some unspecified “misunderstanding” about the numbers and asked for more time to clarify, but then stopped responding.

Unwitting individuals, who can make loans of $20 or more through Web sites like Kiva or Microplace, may also end up participating in practices some consider exploitative. These Web sites admit that they cannot guarantee every interest rate they quote. Indeed, the real rate can prove to be markedly higher.