Indalecio Dangond
I had planned to write about the foundations of the government program of presidential candidate Fico Gutiérrez, but a news item from Bancoldex made me change the subject. The story is the following.
With the advent of digital transformation, banks began to replace their conventional forms of financial services with simple and easily accessible digital systems to reach the largest number of customers with lower administrative and financial costs. It seems that in Bancoldex, they applied the advantages of Fintechs and crowdfunding in reverse. Well, they created a technological platform that works as a bridge that connects microentrepreneurs with bank and non-bank financiers, but with the highest interest rates in the market. It is a kind of financial auction.
It is difficult to understand that a government bank, founded to promote exports and business development with cheap loans, can be converted into an entity dedicated to managing credit resources for micro-entrepreneurs through third parties with high interest rates. In the advertorial that appears in the weekly magazine, they cite as an example and as a great achievement, a loan of 3 million pesos that they helped Leidy Cobos -owner of a cigarette shop- obtain, through Banco Agrario (another bank of government support) at an effective annual interest rate of 32.5%. How awful!
The worst thing about this story is that I found that in Finagro (another government bank), they have been operating since 2019, this abusive and inadmissible financing scheme with the Agrarian bank and other private sector financial entities. In these three years they abused more than 262,000 small rural entrepreneurs in the country, to whom they lent more than 548,000 million pesos backed by the Agricultural Guarantee Fund (FAG) at interest rates that ranged between 28% and 44%. annual cash, when Law 16 of 1990 -which created the National Agricultural Credit System-, established a maximum interest rate cap of DTF + 7% annual cash, for small farmers in the field. They invented the figure of rural microcredit to make fun of the Law. They only needed to contract the network of daily cobras.
It is unacceptable that a couple of government business and agricultural development banks dedicate themselves to taking away the profitability of the businesses of the country’s small entrepreneurs, through microcredit. The Financial and Solidarity Economy superintendencies, such as the fiscal and disciplinary control agencies, are in default of opening an investigation into the promoters of this perverse resource funding scheme to favor third parties to the detriment of the incomes of the micro and small entrepreneurs in the country.
Without a doubt, this should be a priority issue in Fico’s government plan. If we want to reduce the poverty gap and increase income in strata 1, 2 and 3, we must start by lowering the interest rates of microcredits and banking more than 6 million small entrepreneurs who are under the financing mechanism informal called “drop by drop” or “paid daily”.
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