To facilitate doorstep banking to the excluded segment of the urban poor and provide an institutional mechanism for co-ordination between the government and banks, lead bank responsibility has been assigned to 16 districts in metropolitan areas, thus bringing the entire country under the fold of the lead bank scheme and covering a total of 659 districts under the lead bank scheme.
The Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto showcased the unreported unrecorded activity of a vibrant informal sector whose participants remained at the margins. It successfully created many small entrepreneurs but could not secure credit from mainstream financial institutions as they lacked legal ownership of their property, making it difficult for them not only to obtain credit, but sell the business, or expand.