MFI Report

Financial services provided to the poor from the organized financial service sector in India is abysmally insignificant. Hence one of the key resources to overcome poverty is not accessible to the poor. The Government has a number of programs and expends vast resources for poverty alleviation but they are bogged down by corruption & poor execution. A number of efforts have also been made by NGOs through micro-finance to achieve inroads into poverty alleviation. Their efforts have been hampered by inability to attain viable results due to operational inefficiencies & not being able to scale up. These programs have been largely focused on the rural poor despite the very large number of urban & semi-urban poor.

Ujjivan is an unique attempt as we combine the front-end systems (customer acquisition & relationship management) and products of the highly successful micro-finance institutions like Grameen Bank, Bangladesh with the operational, technology and distribution efficiencies of modern retail banking.

We feel that in order for us to scale up, it is essential to establish ourselves as a viable institution. The poor are ready to pay a viable price for the financial services.

Successfully run micro-finance institutions have very low credit cost even compared to the best retail banking businesses in the world. The challenge is to economically deliver the service whose unit size is small & the customers in the rural areas are widely dispersed. Today, with the development of retail banking technology, both in terms of processing capacity & innovative distribution vehicles, will help us overcome the challenge of containing operational costs within manageable proportions

Our goal is poverty alleviation by providing one of the resources (finance) & we will track this as a key success indicator of the organization. Cacher