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CARD Bank provides small loans, savings accounts, and money transfer services to poor Filipino families and small businesses.
CARD Bank is a Philippine bank built for people who usually get turned away by banks: poor families, market vendors, and tiny business owners who need small amounts of money to keep going. It offers micro-loans — little loans, often just enough to stock a sari-sari store or buy seeds for a farm — along with savings accounts and remittance services for money sent home by relatives working abroad.
The core of the business is the micro-loan. A borrower who has no collateral and no formal credit history can still get a loan because CARD lends to groups and to individuals it knows closely through local branches, and it collects repayments weekly or monthly in person. Those repayments, plus interest and fees, are how the bank earns most of its money. Savings deposits give it a cheap pool of funds to lend out, and remittances bring in fees while also pulling in customers who then save and borrow. The reason customers pick CARD over a big commercial bank is access. Large banks find it too costly to serve borrowers asking for the equivalent of a few hundred dollars, so CARD fills that gap with a dense network of branches reaching into provinces and poor neighborhoods. That same closeness creates its main vulnerability: micro-loans are risky, and an economic shock or a bad harvest can make many borrowers miss payments at once. The bank has to keep loan losses low and trust strong to stay profitable.
CARD's parent, CARD MRI, grew out of a microfinance movement founded in the Philippines in the 1980s, and the bank became a licensed thrift bank so it could take deposits and lend more widely. Today it is one of the country's largest microfinance-focused banks, serving millions of low-income clients. Its mission and its business model are the same thing: make money by lending tiny sums to people the mainstream financial system ignores, and do it carefully enough that both the bank and the borrower survive.
Saved answer · last researched 15 Nov 2026