Imagine you are a bank.  What information would you need to determine the creditworthiness of an entrepreneur or a small business?  If the business is at an early stage, financial statements may not be very valuable.  If the business has little physical capital to be used as collateral, it might be too risky.  If the entrepreneur has no credit history, it might be game over.  Microfinance gets around this with the group-lending model, because while it is costly for a lender to assess the c...