Source: Microfinance International Corporation (MFIC).
Original press release available here.
WASHINGTON, December 18 – Microfinance International Corporation (MFIC) received a USD 4 million financial package from FMO, the Netherlands Development Finance Company, to enable the company to accelerate its efforts to provide financial services for remittance senders and their families in both developed and developing countries.
A recent report released by International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), a UN Agency, suggested that 150 million immigrants sent USD 300 billion home last year, an amount that will be growing at a steady pace. A large portion of these individuals and their families lack access to mainstream financial services.
“The partnership with FMO will allow us to boost the growth of our sophisticated microfinance platform for the benefit of transnational families and financial institutions all around the world. Our ultimate goal is to integrate remittance senders and their families into the formal financial sector in both developed and developing countries,” said Atsumasa Tochisako, President and CEO of MFIC.
Els Boerhof, Manager, MASSIF Fund at FMO, said, “We believe that MFIC’s financial solutions have significant potential to lift up the vast number of immigrants on both ends of the remittance chain who are unbanked and send or receive remittances through expensive non-financial providers. FMO has made an investment (both equity and debt) in MFIC to accelerate its global expansion, and particularly the further scaling of its sophisticated remittance settlement platform, ARIAS. ARIAS excels in bringing together banks, microfinance institutions, postal banks, credit unions and other financial networks to provide money transfer and microfinance services to the poor in an affordable, efficient and AML-compliant manner.”
MFIC is a Washington DC-based company funded partly by the Development Bank of Japan. In the U.S., it operates one of the country’s first microfinance institutions, Alante Financial. The company operates a remittance platform, ARIAS, and a distribution network consisting of banks, microfinance institutions and other financial service providers in the U.S. and 85 countries. It also provides microfinance institutions in developing countries with institutional loans for local onlending and a transnational market channel for offering financial products to immigrants in the U.S.
The Netherlands Development Finance Company (FMO) is the international development bank of the Netherlands. FMO invests risk capital in companies and financial institutions in developing countries. FMO’s investment portfolio is EUR 2.7 billion, making it is one of the largest bilateral development banks worldwide. Thanks in part to its relationship with the Dutch government, FMO is able to take risks which commercial financiers are not – or not yet – prepared to take. FMO’s mission: to create flourishing enterprises, which can serve as engines of sustainable growth in their countries.
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