The past 25 years have seen incredible change in Georgia. Over this period, JSC MFO Crystal has grown from a small business project within a not-for-profit organisation founded by a group of internally displaced persons (IDPs) to the largest microfinance institution in Georgia. We now deliver financial services to over 100,000 customers, with a mission to defeat poverty in Georgia by creating entrepreneurial opportunity in Georgia’s agricultural, micro and small business sectors. Our focus on positive development outcomes in all areas of our work has persisted since we began life as Charity Humanitarian Centre Abkhazeti (CHCA) in 1995. Georgia was a very different place, recovering from two damaging ethnic conflicts and a civil war that displaced over 200,000 people and left almost no economic infrastructure.
Our founder and Chairman, Archil Bakuradze, was among those IDPs, confronted with the daunting reality of the challenge that now faced Abkhazians and Georgians alike. Along with co-founder, activist and social entrepreneur Alu Gamakharia, he mobilised a small team of students, family and friends to create CHCA, an organisation built on the belief that IDPs themselves were best placed to understand their own needs. The organisation’s innovation was driven, as Crystal’s is today, by the evolving needs of the people it served. The first microfinance operation emerged in 1998, raising US$ 10,000 of pilot funding from the International Rescue Committee. The impact was almost immediate, with the first period of micro-financing serving thousands of micro-entrepreneurs in Western Georgia over the next three years, attracting grant funding from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the Dutch Refugee Foundation (Stichting Vluchteling) and the United National High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) that included US$ 352,000 for the revolving loan portfolio. At the end of this period, the fund was recycled and handed over to CHCA for the further expansion of its microfinance activity.
By 2001, the microfinance program had become self-sufficient, phasing out grant funding and switching focus to Microfinance Investment Vehicles (MIVs) and commercial banks, including a first Georgian lender, TBC bank. This led to the 2003 decision to split the not-for-profit portfolio from microfinance operations, creating Crystal Fund an independent microfinance institution (MFI) and registering it as a specialised microfinance foundation. In 2007, Crystal Fund reacted to a new law on MFIs by becoming an entrepreneurial legal entity and transferring commercial operations to newly established JSC MFO Crystal, certified by the National Bank of Georgia.
Today, JSC MFO Crystal’s customer-focused and innovative financial services reach almost every corner of Georgia, with the families of our clients making up over 10% of the country’s population. Positive development outcomes remain integral to our approach, pursued through a Triple Bottom Line business model that affords equal value to people, planet and profit to achieve sustainability. Our market-leading consumer protection and award-winning transparency is underpinned by impactful Environmental and Social projects, delivered in partnership with Crystal Fund, to combat Georgia’s most pressing development challenges.
The evolution of our services is clear in the diversity of our 1,000-strong multidisciplinary team, including finance, technology, consulting and data experts working from head offices in Kutaisi, Tbilisi and up to 50 branches. Crystal’s vision is to take the next step in this evolution by becoming a data-driven sustainable bank in 2021, keeping customers at the core of what we do by expanding our services, and contributing further to our mission to sustainably defeat poverty in Georgia.