2010 SEEP Annual Conference: Credit Suisse lunch session: When it comes to training, technology isn't always the answer

As the facilitator said at the beginning of this afternoon’s lunch presentation at the SEEP Annual Conference, three things that Switzerland has in abundance are banks, interest in microfinance and chocolate. Luckily for us, the Credit Suisse-sponsored session on “Training Trends – A Discussion of Training Needs and Challenges” brought all three together in one room. The presenters for the discussion came from organizations supported by the Credit Suisse Microfinance Capacity Building program, including ACCION, FINCA and Opportunity International. As someone only familiar with microfinance in an academic context, it was fascinating to hear the challenges that each organization faces and how they are working to overcome them with flexible training solutions. What didn’t surprise me, coming so recently from semi-rural Nigeria as I have, is that technology isn’t always the answer; personal training still seems to work best.

Valerie Kindt from ACCION International began by explaining that the “global organization” is actually a loose affiliation of member/partner MFIs around the world. They provide direct leadership in their partnership organization via seconded staff, even as high as the CEO or CFO level. They also rely strongly on capacity-based lending, which bases the underwriting decisions on household and business cash flow analyses. Of Valerie’s many excellent points, my biggest take-aways were: 

• their commitment to designing regionally specific programs,
• the methodology of making trainers out of practitioners, and
• the strong focus on risk management, consumer protection and human resources (which struck me as often-overlooked or at least very challenging technical areas).

FINCA representative Bob Price gave a very brief presentation about the importance of training in his organization’s retention strategy in addition to improving MFI operations. In the past, he explained, FINCA’s newly hired and trained staff were quickly poached and the organization hopes to tie training initiatives to an advancement program to help retain their best and brightest. That said, FINCA has faced a challenge in developing metrics to determine how successful the training has been for retention and organizational success. Their other major challenge has been in localizing FINCA’s training materials, both in terms of language and local context; it has proved to be a very big cost to the organization since they operate in so many languages.

Last but not least, Daryl Skoog spoke about Opportunity International’s take on the past, present and future of e-banking and how it affects their training philosophy. Slightly different than FINCA, Opportunity International is more focused on technology and so their trainings, especially consumer education, tend to be driven by that reality. But whether it comes to their mobile banking vehicles, ATMs with biometric scans for protecting consumers, point-of-sale devices, or smart cards, Opportunity International continues to rely on face-to-face, one-on-one training at every chance they get, even if it is as simple as having bank security guards teach customers how to use the ATMs.

So despite the technical difficulties with the microphones—which just goes to show that rural villages aren’t the only ones who struggle with technology—Credit Suisse and their partners presented an informative session.