A dozen years ago, “microlending” seemed like the Next Big Thing, but the idea is older than that. In 2006, Muhammad Yunis, the father of what we know as the “microloan” received the Nobel Peace Prize in the 1980s for the Grameen Bank, which he founded in Bangladesh, one of the poorest countries in the world.
The idea behind the Grameen Bank was to make banking work for the poor by turning it on its head, replacing cash-based...