CAMEO’s long-standing commitment to building California’s microlending sector is the force behind many of our recent programs: Kiva and Accion Texas partnerships, the training series last October, Claudia’s many successes in building resources for lending, to name a few.
Our latest program, Excellence in Lending (EiL), focuses on the program elements needed for a high-quality loan fund poised for growth. Using Kiva’s Field Partner metrics as a starting point, we created an assessment that included:
- Marketing
- Product Design
- Technology Use
- Portfolio Management
- Underwriting
- Approval Process
- Servicing
- Risk Management
- Earnings, Liquidity, Capitalization
- Delinquencies and Collections
Fifteen of CAMEO’s 28 lending members responded. We compiled the aggregate answers, and have created confidential reports to each responding organization so they can see how they stand compared to their peers.
We will use the assessment responses for the morning portion of our 2015 Microlending Forum on January 15. The assessment yielded rich content for discussion. Some topics that show a wide variety of standards and practices are:
- Use of technology
- Staff time in the field
- Servicing practices
- Loan volume per FTE staff
- Portfolio at Risk definitions
- Use of State Guarantee programs
- Risk rating practices
- Interest rates charged
At the Forum participants will discuss what they think of the results: Are there areas that the industry as a whole should address or improve? Are there areas where establishing performance metrics make sense? What needs to be in place for a CDFI to successfully scale up to, say, 200 loans per year?
Ginger McNally, Senior Vice President for Strategic Consulting at Opportunity Finance Network, will join us to give us her take on the results, relative to the CDFI small business lending trends she sees around the country.
We look forward to our members’ participation in this discussion to digest the results and plan future direction for meeting the need for small and microloans in California.