Brenda Gonzalez Lucero
ENT206 Social Entrepreneurship
Case Analysis
03/23/15
Banco Compartamos IPO
Background
Banco Compartamos was born from the philosophy of Dr. Muhammad Yunus and Grameen
Bank, to help the poor overcome their poverty situation. In 1990 Compartamos was created
offering various programs of food, health and microfinance. Several years later, the income
generated out of the interest rates was enough to cover the organization expenses and began to
transform from an NGO to a SOFOL. Their initial results were very favorable having a huge
demand from the largest socioeconomic class in Mexico, the poor. In the year 2000, the company
was constituted as a limited purpose finance company that let them have commercial financing.
By 2004 they had already had two emissions of stock certificates to gain capital from investors.
Seeking for other ways of capitalization they consolidated as a Banco Compartamos and in 2007
they released their IPO on the BMV(Mexican Stock Exchange for its name in Spanish) . In 2008
they reached their millionth loan and today they continue their operations.
Is the IPO consistent with a “pro-poor” approach?
Banco Compartamos strong aim to expand and to reach more people, made them look for
diverse forms of capitalization; one of them was releasing an IPO. Giving the fact that their
starting point was as a NGO, changing then to a SOFOL, and finally transforming into a full
commercial bank, and also that their capital to continue expanding was never an issue because of
its constant increase, their IPO release, even though it was with good intentions, was not
