This Toronto Centre Note explores how financial supervisors can evaluate business models to prevent prudential and conduct failures and how to engage with boards and senior management on this topic to mitigate risks and ensure long-term resilience.

This report shares case studies from six countries that detail how advocacy, partnerships, and tailored regulatory frameworks have fostered supportive legal environments for Savings Groups (SGs), promoting their growth, sustainability, and integration into formal financial systems while preserving their essential informality.

The shift to risk-based capital (RBC) approaches has many benefits for stakeholders in the insurance sector including consumers, industry players and supervisors. Not only does it support the development of the insurance market by providing flexibility and encouraging innovation, but it is also more efficient, allocating capital more appropriately to risk and reducing the amount of dormant capital. Additionally, RBC gives supervisors improved measures of financial soundness, insights into insurers’ risk management practises and corporate governance structures, comparability and proportionate ladders of intervention, leading to better supervision.

The role of executive leadership is key for microfinance institutions to move successfully towards the digital future.

Scale2Save partners FINCA and Centenary Bank in Uganda go from competition to cooperation, sharing service-distribution infrastructure for the benefit of end-user low-income customers.

More radical organizational change - in the form of self-management - is needed to solve microfinance’s optimization problem. 

What can financial cooperatives and their supervisors do to manage the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic?

Based on the evidence thus far, the global pandemic has the potential to deal a one-two punch: a major global health crisis and a global economic crisis that will persist well after the slowing down of the immediate health emergency. While these shocks affect everyone, women - who comprise 1.5 billion of the world’s low-wage workers and twice as many of its carers - may be particularly vulnerable to the economic and health crises that unfold in the wake of COVID-19.