Anil SG, CEO of IFMR Rural Finance, with an image of gold in its liquid form being molded into a solid state, as the initial slide, set the tempo for the topic being talked about at a recent Spark session – both visually and insightfully.

IFMR Capital closed its eighth microloan securitisation transaction this week, an INR 370 mn multi-originator securitisation with Delhi-based MFI Satin Creditcare, Rajasthan-based Sahayata Microfinance and Tamil Nadu MFI, Asirvad.

Finance Matters - A fortnightly column by IFMR Finance Foundation in The Hindu Business Line will explore ways in which the power of finance can be unlocked for improving the wellbeing of millions of households.

“In conversation” is a new series of Q & A blogs from the IFMR Blog team where we ask questions on behalf of our readers to leading personalities in the field of financial inclusion.

On 31st August 2010, I spent a day at Annappanpettai Branch.  The branch was opened on 20th November 2009 and has enrolments of around 1750 when I visited.

At the beginning of the summer, the six of us Stanford summer interns set out to determine, through field interviews and market research

Did you know that only half the adult population in the world has access to a bank account? More than 3 billion people don’t have access to savings accounts, and they are predominantly the world’s poorest people who live on less than US$2 per day.

Recently, CRISIL has revised the rating of the senior and subordinated securities issued by Pioneer III - a pool securitised by Grameen Financial Services – to AAA(so) and A(so) respectively.

In an earlier post on this blog, we mentioned that ‘Mobility’ was going to play an important role in enabling access to KGFS’ products and services in remote rural locations.

At a recent Spark session, Anupama Sharma from the Centre for Insurance and Risk Management (CIRM) spoke about the major lessons livestock insurance has handed out. We bring you the highlights: