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Book Launch "When There Was No Money: Building ACLEDA Bank in Cambodia's Evolving Financial Sector" in New York

Drs. Pieter Kooi, Board Member of ACLEDA Bank; and Mr. In Channy, President & CEO of ACLEDA Bank

November 07, 2005

Distinguished guests, your majesties, ladies and gentlemen, friends and colleagues.

It is a great pleasure to be with you today at the launch for the book "When There Was No Money: Building ACLEDA Bank in Cambodia's Evolving Financial Sector"

You may think that is a strange title for a book about microfinance and building a bank. But it was only a little over a decade, before ACLEDA started in 1992, that Cambodia had no national currency — no money. Currency was outlawed in 1975 and we remained without a currency until 1980. Our experience in building small and micro enterprises and building a bank that serves them is the topic of this book.

Today ACLEDA Bank is the largest retail branch bank network in the country and the second largest bank. We have almost 136,786 active borrowing customers. Nearly 70 percent of our borrowers are women, and outstanding loans now total 89.7 million US dollars. ACLEDA Bank has introduced saving accounts to ordinary people in urban and rural areas through our network of offices, which now number 137 in 22 of Cambodia’s 24 provinces. Today 83,764 small savers who previously did not have access to any bank, now entrust their money to ACLEDA Bank. Our deposits have grown from almost nothing four years ago to nearly 61 million US dollars today.

The book "When There Was No Money: Building ACLEDA Bank in Cambodia’s Evolving Financial Sector"

I want to share with you some of the reasons we wanted to tell our experience through this book. Our experience may be more dramatic than many microfinance organizations —but each organization has its own challenges and solves them in their own way.

We wanted to share the ACLEDA story for two reasons:

• The first reason is so that we remember our history, so that our new staff will be able to see where ACLEDA Bank came from, what are roots are, and what values were important for building our bank.

  We want them to know what we learned as we built what we thought was important for our people and our country.

  We have always thought that our greatest assets are our customers and our staff. It is important that we continue to remember how we first learned about our customers and how we learned how to respond to them in a way that made sense for them, and sense for us. We have grown together.

• The second reason is so that we can contribute to the development of others. We learned a great deal from other microfinance organizations and banks during our 14-year history. We feel that it is our turn to give back.

  It is true that we do not know all the answers, but we know some of them. Just as the lessons from more experienced organizations benefited us, we hope to be of benefit to others.

Mr. In Channy and Ms. Heather A. Clark sign on the book

And I also want to tell you why we wanted Heather Clark to write this book. She has a broad microfinance experience and has seen the results in many countries. We knew she could combine the experience in microfinance and the academic side of the field. We wanted an objective comparison of our experience with the benchmarks of global microfinance, and that is what you have in this book.

But you will find more there, you will find the stories of ACLEDA Bank — those that are not part of a case study; those that don't easily fall on to a chart of organizational growth. You will find the stories of ACLEDA and the people who supported us in our greatest moments of challenge and in our objective to build a bank of lasting value to society.

On this joyful occasion, let me offer my deepest thanks

• to our earliest supporters — the UNDP, the ILO and the government of the Netherlands for believing in what seemed to be impossible at the time.
• I would like to thank those who came later — KfW, Sida, USAID and the Mekong Project Development Facility for recognizing that the risk was great, but they would take it.
• And finally, I would like to thank our current shareholders, the FMO, Triodos Doen and Fair Share Fund, DEG, ASA, and the IFC who have enabled us to grow, and achieve what our founders now know was possible.

At the closing of this UN International Year of Microcredit, I am indeed hopeful that what has been achieved in the last twenty years will serve as firm ground for growth in the next twenty years, and beyond.

At ACLEDA we are happy to contribute our experience to help make financial services markets work and work better for poor and low people in Cambodia, in the region and everywhere. Thank you.