Interview of Vardan Gevorgyan, FINCA Armenia CEO, to Banks.am

- You joined FINCA in times of a crisis. How would you evaluate the company’s operations in these conditions? In general, what do you think is the role of financial institutions in such situations?

- Indeed, it’s quite a difficult and challenging period of time; the state of war, in addition to the obstacles caused by the pandemicmade matters worse. For the pandemic we needed to change the way we operate, guided by certain requirements and restrictions,however; the situation is different in case of the war. There are no rules and requirements and at the same time, people are in a delicate emotional state, which the financial organizations have to take into account while doing business. In this situation, the role of financial institutions becomes crucial in maintaining the continuity of economic processes. In general, the need for financial services is at its highest during and after a crisis since people need funds to rebuild their lives and businesses. As a member of an international network of organizations, parallel to its core business targets, FINCA defines specific and measurable social targets each year. Social impact is an integral part of our mission. It is in such situations that social impact comes to the forefront of operations.

- What steps does FINCA take towards maintaining the continuity of economic processes?

- The majority of our clients are small and medium business owners, women entrepreneurs, sole proprietors and farmers, who are among the most vulnerable to economic shocks and especially now need our support to be able to rebuild their lives. At the same time, they are the driving force of the economy and play an important role in maintaining the country’s financial health and business continuity. At the start, I mentioned that we set social targets every year and one of those targets is making our services more accessible to women. Today, the task of keeping the economy strong is entrusted to women entrepreneurs and in the current situation their role in ensuring the business development has significantly increased. One third of our clients are women and we strongly value our cooperation with them.

FINCA’s mission is to provide innovative and impactful financial services to enable low-income individuals and communities to invest in their futures. Therefore, we are taking steps towards shifting from just a loan provider to a strategic partner for our clients, which will provide a package of services to support farmers and businesses in making progress in their sectors. Funding is going to be just one component of that package along with business trainings, capacity building, strategic consulting, advice and more. As an organization with a social focus, we strongly care how the funding we provide impacts our clients’ lives and businesses, and we believe we can increase that impact by helping them use that funding in the most effective way.

- You talked about the importance of maintaining the continuity of the economy, what steps do you take to ensure the business continuity of your organization?

- We are actively working on upgrading our services so that they best meet the current needs of our clients. First of all this applies to our loans, the terms and conditions of which are currently being reviewed in favor of our customers. Our other core priority is full digital transformation, that is, digitalization of almost all services and automation of processes. This, in turn, will result in the optimization of the lending process and paperwork, create the need to reduce the number of or merge some branches, review the staff list and the distribution of job responsibilities. We have been working on this for the last few years and the tangible results will be visible to the customersduring the upcoming year.

Digital solutions allow us to organize our operations and provide services with much higher speed and effectiveness. It’s interesting how the pandemic drastically increased the need for digitalization, turning digital transformation from just a trend into the most important priority. We have been working on digitalization and automation for a while now, but there was always the worry and challenge that providing digital services might not work out as expected, particularly for us, because a large part of our target market is not as digital and technically savvy as the general public. However, with the pandemic, all the physical limitations and safety concerns, even the most tradition segments had to switch to digital services and even to demand them. As a result, we feel that today our clients are readier for and even looking forward to our digital transformation.

- FINCA has been among the leaders of Armenian microfinance industry for many years, what do you consider its key to success?

Throughout its operation, all approaches, programs and projects at FINCA have been built on the principle of putting the customer’s interest first. Thanks to our customer-centric processes, valuing customer experience and treating them with responsibility and care, we now have a strong and reliable relationship with our customers. In addition, being part of the global FINCA Impact Finance network, we have the opportunity to benefit from international best practices and the entire professional expertise of the network.

- Can you briefly present FINCA’s plans for the upcoming year?

- Our plans for 2021, the main targets of which were based on the processes initiated by the FINCA network during the previous years, are quite ambitious, although we are well aware that the pandemic and the post-war situation have changed the reality. In any case, we are not slowing down our steps towards digitalization and have focused all our potential towards offering our customers more innovative technological solutions. Along with all this, FINCA will continue to improve its offers so that the services provided to our customers best serve their needs and are competitive in the market.

I hope that in the upcoming year we will consolidate our efforts and knowledge, and do our best to recover and strengthen our economy.