AccessBank of Azerbaijan joins MicroFinance Transparency’s Transparent Pricing Initiative

By Nagesh Narayana

Microfinance Focus, Feb 4, 2010: AccessBank, the leader of commercial microfinance in Azerbaijan, has recently submitted pricing data for all its microfinance loan products to MFTransparency.

To date, AccessBank has 98,000 active borrowers and by far the largest portfolio of microfinance products in Azerbaijan, totaling $297 million as of January 1, 2010. AccessBank is a member of the Azerbaijani Micro-finance Association (AMFA), MFTransparency’s partner in the Transparent Pricing Initiative in the Azerbaijani Republic.

During MFTransparency’s Transparent Pricing Initiative, the group, in close collaboration with AMFA, collected data on interest and fees charged on microfinance loan products in Azerbaijan in order to calculate their accurate, true prices (Effective Interest Rates). MFTransparency will post that data for the public to see and learn from on its website (www.mftransparency.org). The Initiative in Azerbaijan has been sponsored by KfW Bankengruppe.

MFTransparency and AMFA co-hosted a training workshop in Baku at the Hotel Respublika on Oct 8, 2009, following the AMFA Investors Fair on October 7, 2009. The workshop marked the launch of MFTransparency’s Transparent Pricing Initiative in Azerbaijan and was attended by 43 participants representing 22 institutions who were trained on issues related to pricing transparency and consumer protection. During the data collection process, the team focused on the 12 largest microfinance service providers in terms of market share, as determined by total gross outstanding loan portfolio and number of active borrowers.

Microfinance was introduced in Azerbaijan in the mid-1990s to address the economic needs of 1 million internally displaced persons who were uprooted during the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict with Armenia and has evolved to serve other areas and sections of the population.

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• Azerbaijan’s microcredit bank AccessBank triples deposits in 2009
• AccessBank wins Azerbaijan’s ‘Best Microfinance Institution To Work For’ Award
• New microfinance bank set up in Tajikistan
• Indian NBFCs Microfinance Network MFIN to assess their transparency level, sources

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