Highlights from Our Twitter Debate on Financial Inclusion IPOs

Initial public offerings (IPOs) have played an important role in both scaling the financial inclusion industry as well as catalyzing discussions that led to necessary improvements in the industry’s infrastructure, regulations, and investor perception and understanding.

The range of conflicting opinions about their impact was on full display in NextBillion’s Twitter chat on Jan. 30.
You can view the full discussion in the Storify here, edited for clarity. The Twitter chat was preceded by a podcast featuring Anna Kanze (COO of Grassroots Capital Management) and Daniel Rozas (senior microfinance expert at the European Microfinance Platform), in which they lay the groundwork for the discussion by exploring the effects of IPOs of Equitas Holdings and Ujjivan Financial Services and contrasting them to the experiences of the earlier IPOs of SKS Microfinance and Compartamos.

Both the podcast and Twitter chat are part of NextBillion’s ongoing special coverage of microfinance. For more on the 2016 financial inclusion IPOs, please read our FIEC-sponsored paper “Lessons from Indian Financial Inclusion IPOs.”