Our Work: Client Assessment

Client assessment is a principle component of market-led microfinance, where business and social objectives converge. Encompassing commercial sustainability, market-led microfinance adds a dimension too long ignored in the industry: the clients. Practitioners are starting to invest in understanding market demand. They are investing in their relationship with clients through more diverse and appropriate products, better customer service, and improved delivery systems.

Client assessment includes impact evaluation and market research to accomplish these goals. The former provides insights about how clients interact with and benefit from the program. Market research focuses on understanding clients in order to know their needs, identifying gaps in the marketplace and assessing the competition. With an increasingly competitive market, MFIs need this information to attract, satisfy and retain their customers. Institutions that offer diverse products tailored to real needs will have greater impact, highlighting how doing good is good business.

Impact Assessment:
Microfinance Opportunities has partnered with the IRIS Center at the University of Maryland on a five-year, six-million dollar Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation grant. Under this initiative, MFO and IRIS will assess a diverse range of innovations in financial services funded by the Gates Foundation to examine the impact of financial services on the lives of poor people across the developing world. This project creates a unique opportunity to extract valuable lessons from a wide range of products, technologies, delivery systems, and countries.

The results of this project will also shed light on the design and delivery of appropriate financial products and services for the poor, and the potential to scale up successful innovations to reach larger numbers of low-income households. This project is scheduled to continue through 2011. For more information, visit the project website at www.fsassessment.umd.edu.

Client Assessment Tools:

The Listening to Clients Series
With a grant from the Ford Foundation, Microfinance Opportunities and MicroSave collaborated to produce the Listening to Clients series, a pioneering audio-visual market research training program for microfinance practitioners. Listening to Clients is an exciting audio-visual training program on market research for practitioners of microfinance. It contains 13 modules that present a collection of assessment tools originally developed by the SEEP Network under USAID's AIMS project and by MicroSave. These tools have been used around the globe and remain among the best available.

Adding to their value, the Listening to Clients video CD series uses PowerPoint scripts to explain the tools while videos clips are presented to illustrate key applications. The CDs can be used in many settings, enabling wide dissemination of the client assessment tools. Listening to Clients is available in English and Spanish.

AMAP Financial Services Knowledge Generation: Market-led Microfinance
Microfinance Opportunities worked with IBM Corporation, USAID and selected MFIs to integrate market research into their operations. By fostering communication with customers at the beginning of the product development process, this information system—or Feedback Loop—ensures the development of customer-responsive products and service delivery.

The project to institutionalize market-led microfinance was based on the premise that market research can be cost-effectively institutionalized within an MFI to improve an MFI's market effectiveness and its profitability.

Microfinance Opportunities conducted a groundbreaking case study of Xac Bank in Ulaanbataar, Mongolia, exploring the link between institutionalization of market-led microfinance processes and the rapid growth of Xac Bank. It is one of only two such studies, both by Microfinance Opportunities, that have been undertaken to date outside of East Africa.