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Does Facebook Need A Humanitarian Partner For Its New Digital Currency?
Libra, according to its website, wants to "reinvent" money by making a financial transaction as cheap and simple as "sending a text message or sharing a photo."
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- Finance, Technology
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Vodacom Poised to Widen M-Pesa Availability
“We think it’s time to level the playing field and so it doesn’t matter how big your GSM base is, customers should be able to access our service,” he added. “We very much see M-Pesa becoming like an OTT service.”
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- Finance
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
- Tags
- fintech
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G7 Urges Tough Libra Regulation, Agrees to Tax Digital Giants
In a summary of the informal G7 talks in Chantilly, north of Paris, the French presidency said the ministers and governors had agreed that “stablecoins and other various new products currently being developed, including projects with global and potentially systemic footprint such as Libra, raise serious regulatory and systemic concerns”.
- Categories
- Finance
- Tags
- cryptocurrency, fintech, regulations
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Small Change: Why Behavioral Science Needs to Go Beyond ‘Nudges’ to Make a Real Impact
Behavioral science – the practice of leveraging human tendencies to produce desired outcomes – has become popular in the social sector. In particular, "nudges" – small changes that subtly encourage better behaviors – are often seen as a solution for everything from weight loss to financial health. But Mariel Beasley, co-founder of the behavioral science group Common Cents Lab, shares an uncomfortable truth: Small tweaks usually mean marginal changes, and half-measures like nudges are leaving most of the potential of behavioral science untapped.
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- Finance
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Melinda Gates Pushes G7 to Close Digital Gender Gap in Africa
G7 finance ministers meeting in France are to endorse a paper from the Gates Foundation saying there is a serious risk that digital technology and mobile banking will bypass millions of women in Africa, leaving them disempowered for a generation.
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- Finance, Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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PayPal Fires up “Ripple-Killer” Xoom App for International Payments
The mobile payments app offers next-day money transfers at fees lower than its main payments platform PayPal. According to the website, transfers on Xoom cost around $4 in Europe and $9 to countries further afield.
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- Finance
- Region
- Europe & Eurasia
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Singapore’s CredoLab to Power Digital Financial Inclusion in Sub-Saharan Africa
CredoLab’s alternative credit scoring solution comes at a critical juncture in the region’s focus on financial inclusion.
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- Finance
- Region
- Asia Pacific
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Why Payment Fraud is a Critical Threat to Financial Inclusion – And How Mojaloop is Making it Worse
The next key step in financial inclusion is payment interoperability, in which digital finance providers’ networks are connected to enable transactions between users of different systems. But though interoperability has major potential for the sector, it also comes with huge risks, says Clear Purchase founder Nick Brown, an expert in payment infrastructure. He explains why a massive payment fraud attack could do substantial and long-lasting damage to the financial inclusion movement, and how an open-source platform like the Gates Foundation's Mojaloop increases the risk.
- Categories
- Finance, Technology