sense of not being a commercial bank.<sup>25</sup> Upwards of 750 million clients<sup>26</sup> of an economic level “not typically served by commercial banks” are estimated for this broad category – only one in four with loans. Commercial banks also offer such services in many countries, but these are not considered “alternative” and as such are not included in the CGAP inventory.<sup>27</sup> Despite its extensive coverage, it needs to be noted that the information on each intermediary stored in the CGAP database is rather limited: name, organizational type, number of deposit accounts, no of loan accounts, no. of members and sometimes the total value of loans and deposits outstanding. Also, it is not free of the multiple banking relationships problem alluded to above.

Shifting from their outreach to the operations of MFIs a large number of assessment reports and ratings are available for specific institutions. No attempt will be made here to summarize those. The largest cross-country database which does include a considerable amount of financial and operating information, is that assembled by the Microfinance Information Exchange (The Mix) with a summary published in _MicroBanking Bulletin_ . This is based on a 12-page questionnaire, covering balance sheet and income statement, infrastructure (staffing, offices etc), products and clients, portfolio performance, liabilities, subsidies received. The response rate has been quite variable from year to year. More than 200 firms reported in the most recent year, but a time series is available only for a fraction of that.

_Seeking information from the regulator and from providers_ In an attempt to obtain further detail on a cross-country comparable basis, the World Bank has recently prepared a questionnaire for developing country bank regulatory authorities (Beck et al., 2004). In addition to regulatory matters, this covers information on branch numbers and on the number and size of different types of deposit and loan accounts broken down by type of intermediary and by class of customer (MSMEs and others, urban vs. rural) and the number and value of payments transactions. Despite concerns that many regulatory authorities might not now have the information necessary to respond fully to this questionnaire, the response rate has been good. Branching and ATM information has been obtained for almost 70 countries and average loan and deposit size information for about 30 countries..

As part of the same exercise, 300 banks in 60 countries are also being surveyed by mail with an 11-page access questionnaire asking about such matters as minimum deposit

> 25 The CGAP database draws on and subsumes the data assembled by the Microcredit Summit (DaleyHarris, 2003).

> 26 About one fifth of this total comes from a very approximate imputation for savings banks based on their total assets and certain assumptions about the distribution of savings balances.

> 27 The largest entities included in the CGAP inventory are: the Postal Savings Banks of India, China, Korea and Egypt (the first two alone account for 234 million savings accounts – about a third of the grand total); India’s Regional Rural Banks (network of almost 200 banks); China’s Rural Credit Cooperatives (network of 35,000 state-owned intermediaries); Indonesia’s National Family Planning Coordinating Board, Bank Rakyat Indonesia (BRI) and the pawn-brokerage Perum Pegadaian; Agricultural Bank of Turkey and Thailand’s Bank for Agriculture and Agricultural Co-operatives (BAAC).

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