This is an inspiring example of self-regulation in action, via a Dave Snowden paper(PDF) found through AOK.
“(The) Grameen Bank which was created in Bangladesh to provide small loans to poor people. The name Grameen comes from the Bangla word for village. This is a market which the conventional banking system finds unattractive. Most commercial and private loans are based on credit scoring, an ordered concept in which the characteristics of good and bad debtors are identified and used as predictors and therefore controls for future lending. This increases the cost of lending as the various processes have to be administered, and small loans this become uneconomic. In the Grameen Bank everyone who took out a loan was required to be a part of a self regulating borrowers’ group in which each member of the group had to take responsibility for the debts of the others. This simple rule which costs little to administer produced a 97 percentage repayment rate comparable with best achievements of the large banks; there are now over two million clients of the Grameen bank and the approach has proved both scalable and portable.”
More info on Grameen can be found either on the link above or in this article:
Yunas, Muhammad (1999) “The Grameen Bank” Scientific American 281 November 1999 114-119