Service Providers

At Guy Carpenter, we firmly believe the microfinance industry, is poised for significant growth. However, we also believe the industry's growth potential is hampered at present by a lack of sufficient access to specifically designed micro-risk management and risk transfer solutions. Currently many microfinance institutions (MFIs) are exposed to a variety of financially unmanageable events (e.g. earthquake, hurricane/typhoon, flood, drought, terrorism, etc.). Even relatively well established MFIs face these same or similar impediments to sustainability and growth. We are working actively to address these issues via the focused application of reinsurance capital, which can be used to protect a MFIs insurance and/or loan portfolio from losses and/or defaults resulting from certain catastrophic or commonplace events. Guy Carpenter’s microfinance initiative originated from an Innovation Grant which the firm obtained recently from the Microinsurance Innovation Facility, a division of the International Labour Organization which was funded initially by the Gates Foundation. The crux of our initiative, and the basis of our partnership with the Microinsurance Innovation Facility, is to explore the potential positive effects which access to reinsurance capital/risk transfer solutions might have on MFIs. In short, we are looking to create a global reinsurance facility which will allow us to aggregate the exposures of many MFIs around the world and to provide them with access to affordable, effective and efficient risk transfer solutions. We believe these solutions, along with focused analytics and advice will enable MFIs to expand current product offerings, improve overall portfolio stability, and increase market penetration/diversification within Central America, South America, and Asia. Cacher