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Safe Money: Building Effective Credit Unions in Latin America
iadb publication - English

Safe Money: Building Effective Credit Unions in Latin America

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Policymakers in Latin America increasingly are turning to policies that have high economic rates of return and a favorable impact on income distribution. By providing financial services to small businesses and poor households —which normally lack such services — credit unions help secure growth with equity. The challenges faced by Latin America’s credit unions today are likely to force them to further modernize and consolidate, fine tune their inherent advantages, improve mechanisms for prudential regulation, and find ways to increase their share of low and middle-income markets. Safe Money presents the new thinking on how credit unions can compete effectively in modern financial markets while still retaining their social mission.

“Once seen by many donors as ideal vehicles for serving large numbers of low-income households, credit unions practically vanished from donors’ and researchers’ road maps in the 1990s. Safe Money puts credit unions squarely back on the table for consideration in development circles, especially those concerned with the small end of financial markets. This book addresses major issues in financial development, including professionalism and grass roots voluntarism, scale economies in retail finance, responsiveness to clients, balance between the interests of savers and borrowers, and government regulation.”J.D. Von Pischke, President, Frontier Finance International

This is a paid publication. Please contact Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) for a copy.

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