Forex Rate – Risks Faced by MFIs
Everybody knows that the majority of the microfinance institutions are running in under-developed or developing countries, which are characterized by high risks regarding currency depreciation or debt restructuring. Such jeopardy keeps occurring periodically. So they’re especially exposed to the risk of forex rate fluctuations.
Recently a CGAP survey found that 50% of the MFIs have zero protection mechanisms against such risks. Yet, they’re as well indicating an overall lacking in their understanding regarding forex risks and/or the degree to the MFIs are vulnerable to those risks.
Thus researchers keep seeking ways to raise awareness among those people regarding the risk of forex rates in microfinance sectors. They are ready to provide them with brief overviews of a variety of components related to those risks. Secondly, if you look at the recent techniques employed by most microfinance institutions (or MFIs) and/or investors managing such risks, it will become clear how urgent it is to clarify to them the strategies of mitigating and avoiding exposures to such exchange risk.
However, there are basically 3 components related to forex rate risks, namely –
The first category of risk however arises within microfinance arena whenever an MFI ends up acquiring debt in any foreign currency (typically USD and/or EUR) and after that on-lends within any domestic currency (or DC). Since after that, the MFI comes with a liability in hard currency, while it’s assets remain in DC, it all results in a horrible “currency mismatch” – which refers to a fluctuation in terms of those 2 currency’s relative values. Such miss matches might threaten the institution’s financial viability.
The 2nd component regarding the risks of forex rate is the convertibility risk. This refers to a particular risk that your national government decides to take a policy that forbids selling foreign currencies to those who have hard currency debts.
And finally, transfer risk refers to that risk that arises when the government forbids people from sending any particular currency out of the country, disregarding which source it came from.
In both of these latter cases, the MFI does have the right to make payments with hard currencies, but they’re not allowed to make those payments in real world, since there are a number of restrictions that the governments impose on them.
Nevertheless, there’re multiple options for these organizations which are exposed to risks of forex rate. Whatsoever, “hedging” happens to be among the most popular options. As you might know, it involves using some special hedging instruments against those risks. Among those instruments, forward contracts are most notable. They are special agreements for exchanging or selling foreign currencies at a pre-set price at some point.
Another instrument is called ‘swap’. It is another special agreement that involves simultaneous exchanging or selling of a particular sum of any foreign currency at the present and reselling or repurchasing that currency on a future date. And finally, you might have heard of ‘options’, which are special hedging instruments providing you with the option of buying or selling a particular foreign currency on a future date.
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