Unified Framework for Public Sector Microfinance Service Delivery
Abstract
When a country is driving towards achieving her social and economic developmentgoals, a very important and necessary factor is the contribution from Entrepreneurs and Smalland Medium Scale Enterprises (SMEs). In this context, it is very clear that National Micro-Finance Institutes (MFIs), mainly in the Sri Lankan Cooperative Sector and other publicorganizations engaged in micro-financing have a greater responsibility and also have to play akey role to bring-up citizens at lower layers of as per se El Salvador Enterprise Pyramid. Whenstudying success cases in the sector, MFIs have to deliver not only pure micro-finance services,but also a variety of other social services such as capacity building, awareness and soft-skilldevelopment, etc.
However, our investigations show that majority of deficiencies that are currently facedby the micro-financing service sector, in particular public MFIs could readily be overcome withpromising productivity and efficiency results by introducing advancements in ICT.
With the experience authors have collected with the engagement in a leadingmicrofinance solution provider in Sri Lanka and with the involvement in global businessstandards, in this work, a unified framework for microfinance service delivery and integrationhas been proposed. The adopted methodology to build the said solution could be considered as ahybrid approach between design science and action research. That is because, adopted cyclicapproach starts with having awareness of the pertaining problems in the sector, then deploymentof IT solutions to mitigate them and finally evaluation that resulted conclusions with importantfeedback to the development and deployment. Further, the awareness and the knowledge aboutthe sector have been collected from active participation of authors in the “community ofpractice”.
The developed working model provides a solution to a long standing need for a UnifiedFramework Micro-Finance service delivery in compliance with global standards. Theframework capable of provide systematic support for Micro-Finance solution development.Further the developed framework could facilitate interoperability and integration with new andlegacy peripheral business application around micro-financing sector. We are expectinginvolvement and contribution from relevant authorities take forward these benefits for thecommunity in need for betterment of the citizens.
Key words: Micro-Finance service Integration, Interoperability, Service modeling,Global standards
