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Digital Remittances: Now that they’re here, where are they headed?
Economic migrants send US $600 billion back to their home countries each year, most using expensive "traditional" agent networks, despite the availability of cheaper digital channels. But Xavier Martin Palomas with the Digital Frontiers Institute notes that in the past five years, we've seen a new wave of players and a renewed push toward digitizing remittances. Next month the Digital Frontiers Institute will launch its first course, Remittances in the Digital Age, to study the rapidly changing industry.
- Categories
- Finance
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Pairing access to finance and energy to solve global poverty
Pairing access to finance with access to energy can help more than a billion people raise their standard of living, banish poverty to the past and no longer be counted among the unbanked.
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Advances and lessons learned from BIM, Peru’s first mobile money wallet
BIM recently announced its plans to launch new services in the second half of 2017. It will enable customers to pay electricity, water and telephone bills, as well as have access to micro savings, loans, and microinsurance.
- Categories
- Finance
- Region
- Latin America
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China’s Major Tech Firms Will Dominate SE Asia’s Emerging Markets: Who Wins And Who Loses?
Digital behemoths Alibaba and Tencent are expanding their e-commerce, cloud and data capabilities across the SEA region, which has a rapidly growing population of more than half a billion people.
- Categories
- Finance, Technology
- Region
- Asia Pacific
- Tags
- e-commerce, fintech, MSMEs, public policy
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What’s the future of mobile payments in Nigeria?
In March 2018, the Central Bank of Nigeria shared its vision to achieve at least 80% financial inclusion by 2020.
- Categories
- Finance
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Viewpoint: Kenya should complete transition to seamless mobile money platform
An estimated 66 per cent of the combined population of adults in Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya are active mobile money users.
- Categories
- Finance
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Uganda Legislators to Block Tax on Mobile Money
A section of Members of Parliament have threatened to block the proposed 1 per cent tax on the value of transaction on mobile money, saying it will discourage low income earners from using the service.
- Categories
- Finance
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Using big data to link poor farmers to finance
The global growth of microfinance banks has created new opportunities for financial inclusion, with outstanding lending of $100 billion to around 200 million clients. Yet the majority of lending from microfinance institutions has been to urban populations and not to the rural poor or small farmers.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Finance