You'd be surprised. FTers and MSers, while accounting for a non-trivial portion of Kiva loans made (not a majority or anything, but non-trivial), certainly aren't the majority of Kiva lenders. I went to a Kiva lender summit* a few years back, when I still lived in the Bay Area, and it was eye-opening. It was way more common to hear lenders say that they sought out riskier loans, were willing to lose money, etc. Most lenders view Kiva as charity, not as a way to generate spend/CC points/returns. The rationale is "I'm anyway forgoing returns by putting money in Kiva instead of investing. Why not try to maximize my impact?" They were very interested in the specific borrowers and the content of specific loans they were making (and most of them had never heard of Kivalens!) -- and didn't really care about things like loan duration, which is of course crucially important to MSers. To this end, while I as an MSer don't love this change, I actually don't doubt that it might have been brought on by lender feedback. All of Kiva's operating expenses come from donations, so it makes no direct difference to them financially whether field partners choose to cover borrower losses or not.

Also: Yes, Kiva knows about MSing and MSers quite well and are cool with us doing what we do -- "within reason". They didn't seem quite so thrilled by the people running hundreds of thousands of $ through Kiva per month (I had no idea that people were hitting Kiva quite that hard!), but were OK with those of us doing a few thousand here and there. They specifically mentioned FrequentMiler as a blog they read, although I don't know if they peruse Flyertalk at all ;-) On another note, they did express a hope that MSers would eventually start donating a little bit to Kiva (they do a lot of internal analytics on who donates, how much, when, etc. and one of the "most vivid" findings from some of these tests was how much less MSers donate relative to any other subset of Kiva user). I've started giving a little bit -- hopefully that keeps us in their good graces!


*Each summer, Kiva invites 100ish of its "very active" lenders to spend a day at Kiva HQ in San Francisco with talks, food, group discussions, etc. -- I highly recommend going if you get an invite (although as a nonprofit they don't pay for anything besides free lunch/snacks)! It was pretty cool, and all of the executives -- i.e., pretty much everyone listed on https://www.kiva.org/about/leadership -- were active participants in the day and were wandering around chatting with lenders etc. Great group of people.