Ngày nay, đặc biệt là ở châu Mỹ Latinh, hai cách tiếp cận đang bắt đầu để đáp ứng và cạnh tranh. Các khách hàng của công ty cho vay tiêu dùng có xu hướng đi từ cuối phía trên của thị trường BOP, đặc biệt là công nhân làm việc bởi các công ty lớn ổn định. Càng ngày, mua tài chính chỉ là điểm khởi đầu. | 16 Microfinance for Bankers and Investors workers buy things. Today especially in Latin America the two approaches are starting to meet and compete. The clients of consumer lenders tend to come from the upper end of the BOP market especially workers employed by large stable companies. Increasingly purchase finance is just the starting point. In Mexico big-box retailers Elektra and Wal-Mart began with purchase finance but are rapidly expanding into full retail-banking services. Elektra created Banco Azteca for this purpose in 2001 and has an enormous head start over Wal-Mart which obtained a banking license for Mexico in 2007. Consumer lenders and microfinance institutions may start with entirely different motivations and philosophies yet they increasingly compete for the same customers. Consumer lending tends to be aggressively commercial with a strong focus on scale and profit. Growth rates among consumer lenders are often extremely high and markets can quickly become very competitive. Consumer lenders are not always beloved by society at large. The . payday-loan industry is frequently vilified in the press for high interest rates and lack of transparency. And crises in consumer lending suggest that the industry has a dangerous tendency to overheat. A few years back Bolivia saw a boom and bust in consumer lending from which it has not yet fully recovered and excesses in consumer lending in South Africa sparked the creation of a regulatory agency focused on client protection. In contrast microfinance institutions begin with a social bottom line. They are more likely than consumer lenders to reach poorer clients and especially the self-employed. Their intent is to better the lives of their clients. Financial return is valued primarily because it enables scale and staying power. MFIs don t treat profit as an end in itself. Some MFIs with a strong antipoverty orientation keep interest rates close to the break-even level as advocated by Grameen Bank s Muhammad .
