In ASA branches, you will find there is one branch manager and four to five loan officers. There is no other staff, like a treasurer, an accountant, office assistant, or secretary. So this is a very small branch, only one man is the branch manager and others are the earning staff…. If you visit the ASA Head Office, you will find that only sixty people are working in that office. You know we have more than 8,000 staff. So, it's not just at the branch level, but also it is at each level that non-earning staff are fewer than the earning staff. It helps us to reduce our personnel costs and there's a calculation here in this paper you will find that each year how much we can save due to this management strategy or cost reducing strategy…

When we started, our outfit had only 50,000 clients. Now we are at 2.5 million clients within 10-12 years. For this expansion, we had to recruit and train our staff in non-coventional ways. The traditional ways of recruiting and training the staff take too much time and also involve a huge cost. So ASA introduced a new methodology for this training. For example: within one day we can interview [and select] about 1,000 candidates. And to train this staff of 1,000, it takes only nine days. We can train our methodology, operation policies, cost reduction strategies within nine days. 1,000 staff and without any cost! That is our strategy to save our cost and improve our efficiency.

Another area where we have improved in efficiency is in the number of active clients per loan officer. In ASA, each and every staff has to look after at least 350 clients. So, they have to always maintain this number to cover their cost and make it financially viable. Then the standard working procedure is another strategy of ASA through which we can save our time, we can also save our cost. We have a working manual, and through this manual, we can operate. We can make our decisions very quickly and it enhances our implementation very quickly. If we implement programs very quickly, we will get returns very quickly, so it helps us to reduce our costs ultimately. Specialization is one of the key factors in ASA. It is a specialist microfinance institution, we are not doing other things, we are only providing financial services. So it also helps us to improve our efficiency and to innovate appropriate policies and procedures to reduce our costs because we are a specialized organization. We always try to innovate to reduce the cost and have effective delivery mechanisms…

Reducing the supervision is the last strategy: we have mid-level supervisors and there is no separate infrastructure or separate personnel for them They are based in a branch office which helps us save on the personnel cost of the mid-level supervisor and the infrastructure cost…

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