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How This Chinese Fintech Company Is Innovating by Leasing Cows
While global investors have often honed in on China’s booming urban centers, Chinese financial tech firms are beginning to look at the middle kingdom’s increasingly affluent rural, farming-based consumers.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Finance
- Region
- Asia Pacific
- Tags
- fintech, rural development
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Bitcoin: Indonesia bars use by fintech firms
Indonesia’s central bank has issued a regulation banning use of cryptocurrencies by financial technology companies involved in payment systems, and said it is examining whether there’s a need to regulate trading on virtual currency exchanges.
- Categories
- Finance
- Region
- Asia Pacific
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Apple Pay takes on China’s internet kings in mobile payments
In an early boost, China’s biggest lender, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China Ltd (ICBC), was among the banks that said earlier this week that customers would be able to use Apple Pay from Thursday.
- Categories
- Finance
- Region
- Asia Pacific
- Tags
- digital payments, fintech
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The Clear Blue Water on the Other Side of the Digital Divide
Digital financial exclusion represents both a development challenge for poor customers, and a missed opportunity for providers, says MicroSave founder Graham Wright. While providers fight for a share of the most profitable and easiest-to-reach markets, they often overlook the vast commercial potential of lower-income communities – in territory that is largely not competed. Wright explores how to tap into this "fiercely loyal" market.
- Categories
- Finance, Technology
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Safaricom adds voice control to m-Pesa
In what the company hailed as a world-first, its customers will be able to check balances before and after making transactions by dialling a number from the handset connected to their account and entering a code.
- Categories
- Finance, Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Investment = Inclusion: Can Fintech, With a Boost from Investors, Level the Playing Field for the Unbanked in Africa?
Fintech – particularly mobile finance – is increasingly vital to Africa's economic growth. But despite the continent's impressive mobile money penetration, much of its population remains unbanked or underbanked. That’s why it’s so encouraging to see another trend developing in tandem with Africans’ embrace of fintech: namely, investors’ embrace of African fintech companies. Iftin Fatah at OPIC explores why more investment means more digital financial inclusion.
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Why America could miss out big time on India’s fintech revolution
There’s an old trope in the West that India is like Indian trains — exotic, lurching and slow. But tropes can be bad as a business strategy — and this trope is causing American companies to miss out on Indian moonshots and trillion-dollar opportunities.
- Categories
- Finance
- Region
- South Asia
- Tags
- digital payments, fintech
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Mastercard unveils mobile order and pay system for Nairobi kiosk owners
Kionect, technology from Mastercard, provides a digital log of transaction data that qualifies these micro-retailers for loans to stock inventory from Musoni, a regional micro-finance provider. With every loan that is paid on time, the kiosk owner has the opportunity to take out a larger loan for a longer term and further contribute to the growth of their business.
- Categories
- Finance, Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
- Tags
- fintech, mobile finance
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