At a dinner the other night, a leading company's Director of Sustainability said he would know when he had done his job well - it would be when he got the sack. And no, not as another victim of the credit crunch, but because all the current 'externalities' of sustainability would become 'internalised' into the company's modus operandi. Risks of climate change, carbon impact, supply chain values etc would have a place on the balance sheet - and crucially in employees' DNA from top to bottom of the business -  just like profit and loss as it is traditionally understood. 'Sustainability' would no longer be filed under "other considerations"; there would be no need for a sideshow department, or Director. Sustainable business IS tomorrow's business.

I see microfinance in a similar way. The test of its success will be its own demise. Microfinance extends financial services (the full range: not just credit, but also savings products, insurance, remittances) to people otherwise excluded from the banking system. Microfinance has achieved a huge amount in poverty reduction terms since Muhammad Yunus first gave a small loan to a poor Bangladeshi woman. Now mobile phone technology is giving it new potential to reach even more excluded communities. But again, microfinance remains a sideshow to finance 'proper'. Indeed the nature of the beast is different - there are cultural differences between microfinance and finance: microfinance is more than finance on a micro scale. Yet learning the lessons of where it works well, microfinance will only reach its full potential if it is mainstreamed into the finance sector. It follows that we will know when it has done its job when there are no separate microfinance institutions, because everyone has a bank account (preferably managed by a responsible bank... 'micro' finance seems to have taken on another twist in these dark days in so called developed countries...).