The following two passages were adapted from articles published in 2005 and 2002, respectively.

Passage A

There have been two notable efforts to supply credit to self-employed poor people in developing countries. One has been the creation by developing-country governments of state banks, particularly to provide financing to the rural poor. These have mostly been a disaster. The other, much more successful effort involved a number of organizations extending uncollateralized loans to very poor borrowers. One such organization, Bangladesh's Grameen Bank, started in 1976 and soon became famous for its "microcredit" business model.

To qualify, Grameen's customers had to be extremely poor, typically earning less than a dollar a day. To overcome the lack of collateral or data about creditworthiness, customers were required to join small groups whose members monitor each other at weekly meetings, applying varying degrees of pressure to ensure repayment. As loans were repaid, people were allowed to borrow more. The group replaced the security that collateral provides. The model is not perfect, but it does have real virtues and has since spread around the world.

Why did microfinance organizations like Grameen originally limit themselves to providing credit? They assumed that poor people were unable to save and that their sole need was for capital. This assumption, however, was probably faulty at the outset. When BRI, a failing state-controlled rural lender in Indonesia, was transformed into a bank serving poor customers in 1984, it offered not only the usual loan products but also a government-guaranteed savings account with no minimum deposit. This has been an extraordinary success: BRI now has 30 million savings accounts.

Passage B

SafeSave is a financial services provider operating in the slums of Dhaka, Bangladesh. With fewer than 5,500 clients, SafeSave is still a small organization, but it is attracting attention because of its unique products. These products are designed to enable very poor urban residents to turn their capacity to save into usefully large lump sums as conveniently and in as many ways as possible.

In essence, SafeSave offers its clients a full banking service on their doorstep, without asking them to form groups. Bank workers, called collectors, visit each client every day, six days a week. On each visit clients may save, or withdraw, or repay loans in any amount they choose. They may also take loans on their doorstep in values based on their proven capacity to save and repay. Given this flexibility, many clients transact very regularly, in volumes that exceed those of more conventional schemes for poor people. This helps explain why SafeSave's clients tend to pay back loans more quickly than do those of Grameen Bank.

The low interest rate it charges for loans is enough to cover SafeSave's operational costs, in part because of cost-cutting devices such as recruiting collectors from among the urban poor themselves, and full computerization. With growth, SafeSave promises to become fully economically sustainable.