Sustainable Microfinance - Balanced Scorecard's added value for ...

In some regions entrepreneurs are able to get microloans through the ‘Borgstelling’.
This is a surety service where the government secures 80% of the loan in order to
stimulate banks to provide the loans. This lowers the risk for the individual capital
provider to the level of an average SME borrower (Gemeente Den Haag, 2009).
Qredits is a combination of traditional banking and sophisticated IT system. Qredits
has nine local loan officers and local contacts that are essential for the assessment
and monitoring. A centralized national back office backs these loan officers, enabling
Qredits to maximize economies of scale and growth towards realizing sustainability
(Qredits, 2010b). The way Qredits operates can be compared with a bank. The main
difference is the specific and individual attention for the micro-entrepreneur. The
lending procedure exists of five steps (Qredits, 2010a); application, intake, screening,
assessment / review and granting. All the information generated during the five steps
is gathered in the IT system MicroNet. This system enables an automated loan
assessment procedure, communication between the back office and the local loan
officer, a highly automated central back office procedure and is linked to several
external actors (Qredits, 2010b). The system can be used constantly for monitoring
and has a lot of potential. Therefore Qredits won the ‘Europe Award’ for Microfinance
Good Practices, endowed with !50,000, - during the 7th European Microfinance
Network’s Annual Conference in London (Qredits, 2010c).
By the time the Council presented its report it was expected that only twenty percent
of the annual 10.000 extra entrepreneurs (see figure 1.2) would need additional
financing.
1.3 Professionalizing
Micro-credit and microfinance in (Western) Europe, and particularly in the
Netherlands, are rather new phenomena (see paragraph 1.1). In developing
countries however, it is much older. Initially, most developing countries accepted
microfinance as an instrument to combat poverty. Then it was acclaimed as an
instrument to boost entrepreneurial initiatives. Subsequently, microfinance institutions
(MFIs) developed comprehensive programs offering a wider range of products and
services to micro-entrepreneurs (Molenaar, 2009). During the maturing process
several performance measurement systems (PMSs) have been developed in order to
cope with the professionalization of the sector.
Elmar Hoogendoorn 8
Sustainable Microfinance