López Obrador, Credits Take the Spotlight

The Crédito a la Palabra 2021 (Credit in Good Faith) program was recently presented by Tatiana Clouthier, Minister of Economy; Ana Bárbara Mungaray, Director of the Ministry’s Productive Development Unit and Alejandro Rosas, Director of the Prospective, Planning and Evaluation Unit. It is a program designed to offer loans to the most vulnerable people and companies. 20,000 of these loans will go to microenterprises that have not laid off personnel during the pandemic, another 20,000 will be given to women who are in charge of a business and, finally, another 20,000 loans will be provided to family microenterprises from the Censo del Bienestar (Well-Being Census).

“We knew that clients were going to need financing and that is where Compartamos Banco plays a very relevant role. In 4Q20 alone, we were able to grow our portfolio by more than 11 percent, which shows the sector has great credit needs,” said Patricio Díez de Bonilla, CEO of Compartamos Banco to El Economista.

 Interested in more? Here are the week’s major headlines in Finance! 

• Minu, a Mexican fintech startup, recently raised US$14 million in capital through a Series A funding round. With this new capital, the company has reached a total of US$20 million to accelerate its growth. “We are very happy about the new capital funding we received and for the validation that investors are giving to the work we do. This allows workers to access their salary when they need it, at any hour of the day,” explained Nima Pourshasb one of the Minu entrepreneurs to Forbes Mexico. With this new capital funding, Minu aims to strengthen its sales team and work with more companies. It will also explore new financial products, such as savings accounts and insurance, to get closer to employees and improve its relationship with them.

•  López Obrador recently celebrated his strategy towards economic recovery and he also mentioned that his government is achieving what was promised without getting into more debt. Valentín Diez Morodo, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Grupo Financiero Citibanamex, and Alicia Bárcena, Executive Ministry of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, had certain doubts about these comments. “Circumstances have coincided with a change of government regime whose decisions are creating enormous uncertainty in the development of the national economy,” said Diez Morodo. 

• “There is no mistake in the calculation of the cost of canceling NAIM,” said Agustín Caso Raphael, Auditor of the Superior Auditor of the Federation (ASF). A few weeks ago, López Obrador mentioned that the numbers provided by the ASF regarding how much it would cost to shut down the NAIM were wrong, saying he had “other data.” Caso explained that “the cancellation of such a large project is no easy feat,” which is why “the audit group took the liberty to establish methodologies that shed light on such a phenomenon,” according to El País. These included the application of “non-countable economic criterion.” “There is no right or wrong number, only different methodologies,” he said, according to El Financiero.