The project asks how the identity and organizational processes of microfinance institutions (MFIs) are being constituted and shaped by publicly accessible platforms, benchmarks and rankings (e.g., Heintz/Werron 2011). They make many kinds of MFIs all over the world visible. In doing so they constitute linkages not only between different kind of actors (e.g., investors, development professionals, regulatory bodies, MFIs, see Henriksen 2013), but also between different institutional spheres (e.g. Greenwood et al. 2011) – a financial, purely economic world with a welfare oriented one. In that way they constitute a new market sphere of impact investing (e.g. Chiapello/Knoll 2020). How those observational spaces through ordinal classificatory judgements (Fourcade 2016) stimulate within MFIs organizational sensemaking (Weick et al. 2005) and thereby constitute and reinforce a specific organizational self is at the core of the analysis which is based on a rich data corpus gathered during extensive ethnographic field studies within MFIs in Nicaragua. Going further the project focuses the intervening of different valuation levels. The perception of valuation by external third parties translates to specific internal valuation practices of the performance at the organizational and personnel level within MFIs. These internal valuation practices are constitutive for the organizational core activities of MFIs: the provision of many loans and the ex-ante-avoidance of repayment problems. Both are conflictive, especially in competitive contexts. How MFIs deal with those conflicts in their day-to-day activities and what those activities mean related to their self-description as poverty reducing agents are further questions of project.