The Role of ICT in Helping Parallel Paths Converge: Microcredit and Correspondent Banking in Brazil.

Two important phenomena in the financial sector have drawn attention in recent years. on the one hand, microcredit is growing and earning renown as a powerful instrument for income generation and poverty reduction in a number of developing countries; on the other hand, correspondent banking (CB) outlets have risen to prominence as a main channel for the distribution of financial services to the low-income population, with particular success in Brazil. This paper argues that information and communication technology (ICT) applications have the potential to help these two movements, until now tracing parallel paths, to converge. We apply an emergent conceptual framework that combines three theoretical lenses: social shaping of technology, structurationist view of technology and contextualism. The result is an original reading of the possible combinations of CB and microfinance in Brazil and the expectation that the multilevel framework might help to understand similar complex phenomena in other Latin America contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]