Spot the gilded facade SPEND a few days in Yangon, and you can almost believe you are in a country with a functioning financial sector. ATMs, completely absent just a few years ago, now dot the city. Credit cards are increasingly (though still not widely) accepted.Outside the big cities, however, this façade falls away. As of last September Myanmar’s 24 banks—four of which are wholly state-owned and another 11 of which are at least partially government-owned or managed—had a total of 863 bank branches. Thailand, with just 14m more people, had nearly 7,000 more branches; the number of branches per person in Myanmar barely exceeds the level of South Sudan, and falls short of Afghanistan’s and Haiti’s. A report from the International Finance Corporation, published in 2013, estimated that just 5% of Burmese use formal financial services.What banks exist suffer from both restrictions of little prudential value and an antiquated financial system. Loans, for instance, must be highly collateralised—often up to double the amount of the loan—with only a few things (land, gold, some export commodities) accepted as collateral. Loans cannot be made...
from The Economist: Finance and economics http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21627698-myanmar-has-licensed-few-foreign-banks-its-financial-sector-still?fsrc=rss|fec
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