I just spent a week in Bangkok, both for business and pleasure. The trip started on the previous Friday when I spent the weekend there to catch up with an old friend and to discover different parts of Bangkok. I was pleasantly surprised at how cheap it is to travel from the airport to the town centre using public transport. Taking the airport train and then switching to the transit system cost me less than USD 1.50 dollars!
I love to go to a city and roam around to discover new places, visit local wet markets and eat where the people eat. I could easily walk more than 20 km a day. Even if I am alone most of the time, it is ok for me. It is my me-time.
The main reason for my trip was to attend a business conference that my Myanmar partners had signed me up for. It was the inaugural annual gathering of the financial sector in Asia with the impact community. https://www.afiforum.com/ It was to advance the purpose of financial inclusion of the masses with the purpose of eventually lifting them out of the poverty cycle. Our Myanmar microfinance company lends to the rural farmers in the agriculture sector. We are constantly seeking to borrow long term facilities from such companies so that we can on-lend in smaller amounts to our end clients – farmers, vendor and micro SMEs.
My whole banking career has been mainly been dealing with regional/global banks. I was new to impact investment companies and I had the opportunity to meet up with many of such names in this forum. All of them do not have just profit as the main motive. They also look at the social impact and the borrower’s ability to reach out to the group of people who normally do not get access to banking facilities.
Most of these firms generally have the backing of European governments as equity partners or they may have private investors with specific mandates to target the developing countries that needed financial help. Normally, commercial banks ignore this segment as it may not be profitable and notional amounts are usually not big.
We got to have many one-on-one meetings with these names, as our CEO had arranged the schedule over the 2 days. He was very familiar with them as he had spent part of his career with one of them, seeking investment opportunities and doing due diligence on the borrowers. Names that are new to me and we met include the following : BlueOrchard, ResponsAbility, Icofin, FMO, Proparco, BIO, TripleJump, Symbiotics, Triodos and CordAid.
They provide a lifeline to small companies like ours, being willing to take on the counterparty risk of growing setups that align to their investment mandate of creating a lasting impact on the community. Making a profit, while important, is secondary. Impact investing encompasses a wider set of goals that is answerable to shareholders who are not like your normal equity investors. They are more long term minded and seeks to provide seed money for firms like microfinance firms to develop their next stage of growth.
Overall, it was a good experience to be able to dive into another area of banking which I know very little about, even though I have been in this line for 28 years. One is never too old to learn…
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