| "Financial Information seeks to expand its banking technology business, aimed at microfinance lenders, enabling the small loan industry to scale rapidly and reach 600 million people without any access to credit and basic financial services,'' Legatum President Mark Stoleson said in an e-mailed statement today. |
| Dubai, United Arab Emirates-based Legatum said it spent $1 billion on Indian finance companies during the past three years, but did not provide any details on its holdings in Financial Information. |
| The investment group also bought a $24.4 million stake in Share Microfin to help the Hyderabad-based company boost its lending to the poor, Legatum said on May 15. |
| India, the world's second most populous country, is seeing a rise in incomes after the economy grew more than 9 per cent a year in the last two years. |
| McKinsey forecasts the number of poor, or households with income less than $5.4 a day, will drop to 22 per cent by 2025 from 54 per cent in 2005. |
| The Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has been asking the state-run banks, for the last three years, to lend more to farmers and rural dwellers. 70 per cent of the nation's population of 1.1 billion people live in 638,000 villages. |
| India's largest lender, State Bank of India, aims to lend to 1 million self-help groups by 2008, from 540,481 SHGs in the year ended March 31, 2006, according to its web site. The bank lent Rs 22.62 billion in the year ended March 31, 2006, from Rs 13.11 billion during the earlier year. |
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