The microfinance industry has been going through challenging times due to Covid-19. Microfinance Institutions not only need to survive but also to succeed, and digital transformation helps achieve this objective. With 28 years of microfinance training experience, the Boulder Institute is launching a French ONLINE version of our DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION OF MICROFINANCE INSTITUTIONS PROGRAM (DT-MFIs) with a full set of the fundamental concepts our organizations need to deepen our commitment to serving our clients more completely.

Participants in this DT-MFIs Certificate Program will obtain a thorough understanding of the key ingredients in any pathway toward digital transformation. After this program participants will be able to help guide their organizations through the process of redesigning their relationship with clients and field staff, putting together a digital ecosystem, creating usable data, putting together agile teams and design processes, and deploying digital financial services. The program is designed specifically around the challenges MFIs face when they move from analog to digital systems and how to strengthen their relationships with clients in a digital age.

Module 1: COVID and the Drive Toward Digital Transformation

In this module, we will explore the impact of the pandemic as a catalyst for digital transformation. We are going to extract the main lessons that will feed a dynamic of sustainable innovation rather than a visceral reflex of survival. 

• Ciprian Panturu
• Ruth Mensah

Module 2: Strategic and Business Planning for Transformational Change

This module will present the fundamentals for planning for digital transformation. The focus will be on business imperatives such as increasing income through enhanced services.

• Omoneka Musa

Module 3: Transforming Products and Services for the Digital Age

This module will feature a panel with senior network executives who will discuss how they moved from analog systems to offering digital products and services, starting from before the pandemic and accelerated by it. 

• CEOs from international networks will join us

Module 4: Building Partnerships and a Digital Financial Ecosystem for Your Clients 

This module will focus on the different types of partnership that strengthen the digital finance ecosystem and how to harmonize them to better serve the beneficiaries while drawing extensive practical experience from French-speaking countries, 
Anglophones and the MENA region. 

• Peter Ndongla Nzebile

Module 5: Managing Agent Networks

In the DFS, one of the determinants of success remains a scaled, effective and efficient agent network. In this module, we will identify the Key Success Factors of a deployment, but also of agent network management. This will consist of addressing (i) the perfect ability to deploy an effective agent network (ii) the ability to analyze and correct an existing network and (iii) the ability to make an agent network efficient by choice of the best business model. 

• Franck Bossa

Module 6: Building Data Management and Analysis Capability

This module will feature a panel where executives relate their experiences as they moved from a product-based MIS to a client and staff-based system that is driven by the need to segment their client base and generate additional income. 

• CEOs from international networks will join us

Module 7: Risk, Fraud and Consumer Protection in DFS 

This session will look at the operational risk attendant to digital transformation and managing the analog business as usual while in other areas introducing digital products, processes, and communications.

• Djibril Mbengue
• CEOs from international networks will join us

Module 8: Cyber Security: Protecting Customers and Organizations, Building Trust

This session will focus more narrowly on the risks associated with the digital world, their mitigation, and approaches to building a constant risk monitoring capability. 

• Jean-Louis Perrier

Module 9: Managing the Human Dimension of Change

This module will present the core elements of leading change and obtaining buy-in from staff as we ask them to adopt innovative technologies for communicating with clients, originating loans, and generating other products and services in a digital age.

• Sahana Arun-Kumar

Module 10: Strategic Direction for a Future Beyond Classic Microfinance

This module will look at what changes are coming from outside our community that will impact financial inclusion and what we may need to do to accommodate or take advantage of them. 

• Hermann Messan

Faculty

Boulder Institute programs bring together faculty that include some of the most noted leaders in the field of microfinance to engage microfinance professionals in learning about innovative issues, core principles, and the latest techniques for providing access to financial services for the world’s poor.

Faculty bios

This Program will be led by Djibril Mbengue and Hermann Messan with invited senior faculty who will drive the content and activities of each Module.

FACULTY BIOS