Microfinance Products and Services Training Course

Participants can convert client research into prioritized product requirements and segment choices.

• Segment clients by enterprise cycle, household profile, location, and financial behaviour
• Use financial diaries and interviews to quantify unmet product demand
• Jobs-to-be-Done statements connect customer circumstances, motivations, and desired progress
• Calculate willingness-to-pay ranges without confusing demand with stated preference
• Conjoint analysis tests attribute trade-offs among price, term, collateral, and access
• Translate research findings into prioritized product requirements and exclusion criteria

Participants can design credit products that match business cash flows and institutional risk appetite.

• Set loan purposes, amounts, tenors, grace periods, and repayment frequencies
• Match instalment schedules to seasonal cash flows and inventory cycles
• Compare individual, group, solidarity, and value-chain lending methodologies
• Develop cash-flow-based underwriting without relying solely on physical collateral
• Design collateral substitutes: guarantors, savings pledges, warehouse receipts, and movable assets
• Specify restructuring, refinancing, top-up, and early-settlement product rules
• Document product terms in a credit policy and customer disclosure

Participants can assess non-credit products for client value, operational feasibility and responsible delivery.

• Structure voluntary savings features within applicable licensing and liquidity constraints
• Compare commitment savings, goal accounts, recurring deposits, and emergency balances
• Assess microinsurance value propositions, exclusions, claims processes, and insurer responsibilities
• Bundle payments, remittances, and bill collection with transactional customer needs
• Apply responsible cross-selling controls and informed-consent requirements at point of sale
• Evaluate product bundling effects on uptake, cost, and customer value

Participants can price microfinance products transparently while testing affordability and sustainability.

• Build product cost allocations using activity-based costing drivers
• Calculate effective interest rates, flat rates, fees, and annual percentage rates
• Model break-even volume, operating expense ratios, credit losses, and funding costs
• Separate price affordability analysis from subsidy and cross-subsidy decisions
• Test sensitivity to delinquency, inflation, funding cost, and transaction volumes
• Present transparent price disclosures using local regulatory requirements and plain language

Participants can select and design delivery channels using customer, risk and unit-cost evidence.

• Map assisted and self-service journeys across branch, agent, mobile, and USSD channels
• Select channels using transaction frequency, customer capability, and unit-cost evidence
• Define agent liquidity, commissions, training, supervision, and escalation procedures
• Design digital onboarding controls for identity verification, consent, and data quality
• Measure adoption funnels from registration through first transaction and repeat use
• Plan exception handling for failed transactions, complaints, and service outages

Participants can embed fair treatment, accessibility and social performance measures within product governance.

• Apply Client Protection Standards to product design, sales, and collections
• Use Universal Standards indicators to track social and environmental performance
• Assess over-indebtedness through debt-service capacity, bureau data, and refinancing patterns
• Set complaint-resolution workflows, service-level targets, root-cause coding, and reporting
• Build accessibility features for women, rural clients, older persons, and disabilities
• Review algorithmic bias risks in digital credit scoring and decisioning
• Establish informed-consent scripts for data use, insurance, and third-party sharing

Participants can establish product controls that address credit losses, fraud and conduct risks.

• Construct credit scorecards from repayment, cash-flow, behavioural, and bureau variables
• Set approval authorities, exception limits, and maker-checker control points
• Monitor PAR30, write-offs, rescheduling, vintage curves, and collection effectiveness
• Apply IFRS 9 staging concepts to expected credit loss governance
• Investigate fraud indicators involving staff collusion, identity theft, and cash leakage
• Design collections pathways that preserve dignity while managing arrears

Participants can plan controlled product pilots and make evidence-based scale, revise or stop decisions.

• Frame product hypotheses using customer problem, segment, value proposition, and economics
• Build a minimum viable product with service blueprint and operating rules
• Set pilot cohorts, control groups, success metrics, and stopping criteria
• Use Build-Measure-Learn cycles to interpret uptake, usage, repayment, and complaints
• Run pre-mortems covering conduct risk, fraud, technology, and operational failure
• Prepare governance papers for product approval, pilot funding, and risk sign-off

Participants can monitor product performance and create a practical implementation plan for their institution.

• Build product dashboards linking outreach, usage, revenue, risk, and client outcomes
• Analyse cohort retention, cross-sell, dormancy, and repeat-borrowing patterns
• Prioritize product changes using impact-effort matrices and evidence thresholds
• Define review cadences for pricing, terms, controls, and customer feedback
• Create a 90-day implementation plan with owners, milestones, and dependencies
• Present product decisions using assumptions, trade-offs, and documented approval criteria