In the last decades microfinance has been accounted as a revolutionary financial instrument for development. Nevertheless, outcomes in terms of poverty reduction have not been as extraordinary as was expected. Despite a huge academic progress registered in a large set of publications, we meet with relevant limitation in order to foresee and identify its determinants. This matter could be closely related to uncritical assimila tion of a minimalist approach as the systemic structure where academic progress has been conceived. This reductionist and aprioristic approach, far from shedding light on the foundations of microfinance, confines it into a symptomatic analysis extremely descriptive and conceptually sterile. With a critical exercise of four underlying categories we pretend to assert the impossibility of a minimalist approach as knowledgeable and operative structure for development.