The Dominican Republic's microfinance sector is considered to be a solid market where over-indebtedness prevention best practices are widely and successfully implemented. Relying on qualitative data collection tools and analysis, we identify these ‘best practices' as self-regulation mechanisms, and we show how they fail to fully fulfil their goals in the Dominican market. While financial exclusion supports the idea of a sizable microcredit market, we argue that the focus on growth and high competition strongly jeopardizes the positive social outcomes of microcredit, and that only a paradigm shift within the sector will really change the present situation. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.