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Indonesian start-ups helping to broaden financial inclusion
A string of innovative financial products from Indonesian start-ups are circumventing the traditional payment and investment system, helping to broaden financial inclusion and challenging the established banks.
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- Uncategorized
- Region
- Asia Pacific
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Thundafund: The crowdfunding platform made for Africa
One South African company has created an ethically-conscious platform for entrepreneurs from the continent -- and it's leaving its rivals by the wayside in the process.
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- Uncategorized
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- Sub-Saharan Africa
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NexThought Monday – How 5,000 Stranded Flip-Flops Almost Doomed Three Social Startups
Five years ago, Village Capital made its first investment – in Feelgoodz, the a U.S. fair-trade rubber company, which sells comfortable flip-flops that are responsibly manufactured in South Asia. Feelgoodz got a major purchase order from Whole Foods that January. Sounds like a great story, so why is the headline so depressing?
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How one man wants to lend cash to 500m Chinese and lead a microfinancing revolution
Zane Wang Zhengyu, founder and chief executive of lending company China Rapid Finance (CRF), wants to redraw the mainland's credit landscape.Wang hopes to create the mainland version of the San Francisco-based Lending Club, which offers borrowers funds at rates lower than those charged by credit cards. Ideally, the model could help meet the financing needs of 500 million potential mainland customers, many of them borrowing for the first time.
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- Uncategorized
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- Asia Pacific
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- microfinance
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Social Enterprises Get US$112K Worth of Grants at DBS-NUS Event
DBS Foundation and NUS Enterprise have announced the winners of the 2015 DBS-NUS Social Venture Challenge Asia (SVC Asia), adding that they would receive grant monies totalling S$150,000 (US$112,000).
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- Uncategorized
- Region
- South Asia
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Twitter Top Ten – 6-14-15
This week Twitter CEO Dick Costolo stepped down. His exit was expected, considering the pressure from Wall Street and from one of Twitter’s biggest investors Chris Sacca to make the service more user friendly. Until that day comes, we’re happy to curate our favorite Tweets of the week for you.
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Weekly Roundup – Walter Peck Had a Point: Why regulators and entrepreneurs sometimes have to ‘cross the streams’
There were plenty of supernatural bad guys in the movie Ghostbusters, but the villain you probably despised the most was the overbearing EPA agent Walter Peck. But while he may have been a jerk, his efforts to regulate the Ghostbusters were absolutely justified. We (somehow) tie the film to recent events in Uganda’s mobile money industry in this roundup.
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Three Ways the Mobile Finance Ecosystem Can Reach the Next Level: Grameen Foundation takes a look ahead
Mobile finance has spread around Africa and the world, but many still live beyond its reach – especially in rural areas. And both technical and business challenges still make it hard to reach them. In the final post in their series on how microfinance can go digital, Grameen Foundation explores three ways progress will need to be made for the global mobile finance ecosystem to take the next steps.
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