Dear Friends / Visitor,

Welcome to our new website. We enjoyed developing this new site and we hope that you not only like the new look of the ShoreCap Exchange site but also find it more useful.

The year 2007 was a promising year for ShoreCap Exchange. With ongoing collaboration with our bank/MFI partners, donors and ShoreBank, we continue to grow and develop in new and exciting ways that we had not contemplated even twelve months ago.

By the end of 2007, our sister company, ShoreCap International, invested a total of $20 million in ten financial institutions -- four high-performing microfinance companies and six leading small business banks located in Kenya, India, Cambodia, Bangladesh, Tajikistan and Mongolia, the Gambia, Philippines, Uganda, and Afghanistan respectively. During the year, Exchange helped build capacity on the ground at our bank partners, as well as delivering a number of peer learning and knowledge exchange forums and events. Exchange addressed areas including risk management, internal audit, small business lending, human resources strengthening, remittance business feasibility, savings mobilization, IT conversion, and needs assessment.

Exchange expanded its knowledge exchange program. Active peer forums now exist among small business lenders, human resources managers, and CEOs respectively. These are periodic in-person forums and conference calls that match key managers at our partner institutions with industry experts and peer bankers from other peer banks in Africa and Asia. The forum participants discuss common challenges and share practical innovations, strategies, lessons and tools to assist one another.

In June, Exchange held a highly successful forum in South Africa for senior managers of fast-growing banks on Risk Mitigation Strategies. Bankers attended from 14 countries, primarily South Asia and Southern and Eastern Africa. The content, as usual, focused on operational strategies and risk management tools, with a particular focus on risks associated with rolling out new products and delivery channels.

Exchange held its first virtual conference on individual microlending with MicroSave on August 15-17, 2007. The three-day conference had 220 attendees and was moderated by two ShoreBankers, Bill Crew and Donna Nails. Feedback from attendees confirmed the usefulness of the virtual medium, which allowed participants to join in at different times of the day, receive daily digests, and access tools and methodology information. Two phone peer learning forums were held for human resource managers and lenders, respectively, as well as an in-person brainstorming session for small business lending experts. In addition, planning has begun on the next in-person Human Resources Forum, which will be held in early 2008 in India.

In 2008, we will begin more intensive on-site work with our four newest bank partners, two of which are start-ups — BRAC Afghanistan Bank, based in Kabul and Reliance Financial Services Company Limited, based in Banjul in The Gambia. We had not contemplated supporting start-ups when we began operations in mid 2004, and are delighted to be afforded the opportunity to work with the founders of these two institutions.

Finally, a hearty congratulations to our ten partner banks, which have collectively extended over $1.2 billion in net loans to more than 550,000 small business and microentrepreneurs as of September 30, 2007, and to our donor partners and board members that have helped contribute to this success.

Wishing all a fulfilling 2008.

Sincerely,
Lynn Pikholz

Lynn Pikholz, President

Lynn Pikholz, a South African national and former Senior Managing Director of ShoreBankAdvisory Services, ShoreBank’s international consulting company, serves as the President and CEO of Exchange. Lynn has over ten years of development finance experience and has worked closely with development finance institutions in Southern and Eastern Africa, South East Asia, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe as well as in the U.S. Employed by ShoreBank Advisory Services since 1996, she has written extensively on development finance. Lynn previously worked in South Africa for a major commercial bank (Barclays) and for The Urban Foundation, and she holds an Honors Degree in Marketing and Economics from the University of Cape Town and the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, and a Masters degree in Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.