The USD 4.9 trillion MSE finance gap is large and persistent despite decades of effort by the international development community. Among a myriad of other reasons, this is driven in no small part by a tendency among financial service providers and funders to consider MSEs as a monolith. In reality, however, the nearly half a billion MSEs in emerging markets are a diverse universe of firms varying in size, sector, ownership, entrepreneurial goals and journey, digital readiness, and financial attitudes and behaviours.

CGAP’s Focus Note advocates the importance of segmentation of Micro and Small Enterprises (MSEs) for designing relevant financial services and targeted support mechanisms, and identifies five salient dimensions of segmentation – firm size, sector of operation, entrepreneur’s mindset, entrepreneur’s gender, and growth stage of the enterprise. However, in practice, effective segmentation is often challenged by the lack of data, analytical capabilities, organizational incentives, and analytical frameworks to identify relevant segments.

In this webinar, CGAP will moderate a roundtable discussion on the opportunities and challenges in effective segmentation amongst a range of stakeholders from the MSE finance ecosystem including incumbent and fintech providers, funders, and researchers.