Interview with Lilian Simbaqueba, interviewed by Andrea Lluch, Bogotá, Colombia

Lilian Simbaqueba, founder and president of LiSim, narrates her journey founding one of Colombia's first microfinance companies in 1996. She explains how her time in Germany studying IT engineering was a major inspiration for her later entrepreneurial undertakings. As she recalls in the interview: "I had a chance to work for a multinational company that built risk forecast models for credit evaluation--particularly for credit cards. There [in Germany], banks and credit institutions rely on those evaluations. My experience started there, prompting me to dream about returning to my homeland and building my own firm" around those principles. This unique skillset indeed played to her advantage. In the interview, Simbaqueba explains how she was one of the few people in the Colombian financial services industry familiar with a new practice called scoring, and how she leveraged this knowledge to found her own business and quickly build a client base. She also discusses some of the strategies she used to adapt both the scoring system and her business model to fit the Colombian setting. In 1998, just a few years after the founding of LiSim, Colombia experienced a severe economic crisis. Sim