AnnuAl RepoRt FY 2008 - Microfinance Information Exchange

Letter from the Chairman of the BoardA Good Year for Transparency2008 proved to be another good year for MIX. The organization furthered its reputationas the transparency backbone of the microfinance industry by increasing itsreach of coverage, and by providing analysis and reports on microfinance marketsthroughout the developing world.MIX has built a unique and powerful global reporting platform for microfinanceand our coverage improved significantly. At the end of the 2008 fiscal year –June 30, 2008 – 1225 MFIs from 93 countries serving more than 66 million borrowersand 71 million savers were reporting to MIX, and that number continues toincrease. The web portal, MIX Market (www.mixmarket.org), is providing fresh,high quality data on MFIs, as well as information on funding organizations, networksand other service providers. The benchmarking reports, published in theMicroBanking Bulletin, are the single most important reference for performancemetrics in microfinance.The microfinance industry recognizes MIX’s contributions and expertise. Academicresearchers, investment banks, private sector investors and funders, multi-lateraland bi-lateral development organizations, and governments all rely on MIX for ourdata services and statistics on the performance of microfinance institutions and theindustry overall. The mainstream media also recognizes MIX’s role in the microfinanceindustry; in recent months, The Financial Times, The Economist, Forbesmagazine and Time magazine all cited MIX data.Obviously, there is still much more work to do at MIX. We need to continue expandingour coverage by focusing on regions that do not have strong representation inMIX data. We also need to focus on our data quality to ensure that the informationwe are making publicly available is as fresh and clean as possible. We need to offernew information services on MFI products, funding structure information and socialperformance data to respond to the evolving demands of our clients. And finally,we need to invest in our IT platform to better deliver our information services andto meet user expectations, as well as to ensure stability and security of our database.These will be the priorities for MIX for the next 12 months, and beyond.2