Category: Financial Inclusion
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What is Underwriting?
Underwriting is the careful review of a loan application to decide whether the borrower can repay the money. It is how banks measure risk before lending. The word itself has an interesting history. In the 1600s, merchants and ship owners gathered at Edward Lloyd’s Coffee House in London to arrange insurance for risky sea voyages.…
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What is Income Instability
When a bank decides whether to give someone a loan, it wants to know more than how much money the person earns. It also wants to know how stable that income is. This is called income stability. Income stability means how reliable and consistent a person’s earnings are over time. Someone who receives regular pay…
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What Banks Look At Before Giving You a Loan
When banks decide whether to give someone a loan, they want to know one thing: Can this person really afford it? To help answer that, they use affordability ratios — simple comparisons between income (how much money you earn) and debt (how much money you owe people). 1. Debt-to-Income This shows how financially stretched someone…
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The Real Bottleneck in Financial Inclusion Isn’t Regulation
Jamaica is not excluding people from finance by choice. It is excluding them by process. Every delay in opening an account, every manual underwriting step, every conservative credit assessment that defaults to “no” is a quiet decision made by a system that was never designed for the people it now serves. Inclusion fails not at…