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Vodafone to roll out M-Pesa services in Andhra Pradesh, Kerala
Vodafone India and ICICI Bank are planning to roll out mobile money transfer and payment service in Andhra Pradesh and Kerala. With this, Vodafone India will cover almost all states in India, thereby enabling people to send, deposit or receive money through mobile phones.
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What Is Scale? Hint: Social Enterprises Don’t Have To Be Huge To Reach It
A couple of years ago, I was working on a strategic planning project for a start-up that got hung up on the idea of “scale.” The founders were thinking globally, but meeting locally – in a windowless conference room, with lousy coffee, a couple of laptops, and no employees. We made of lot of lists, blew through a lot of Powerpoint, did many meetings. The ideas were fantastic, the potential market of those who needed the proposed services were in the tens of millions, and the business plan was sleek. But they couldn’t start small enough to prove the model. It had to be national right away, because the idea was so strong.
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Weekly Roundup – 3/29/14: Blurred Lines in Banking – the changing definition of “bank” at the BoP
The Internet has reshaped banking in the U.S., where half of the population hasn’t entered a bank branch in the past month. This evolution has been even more dramatic at the BoP, where mobile and branchless banking services are making brick-and-mortar banks increasingly obsolete. We take a look at these changes in this week’s Roundup.
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What will new governor of Zimbabwe’s Reserve Bank mean for mobile money?
If you were waiting, the wait is finally over, former CBZ chief and Economist Dr Mangudya will be the new substantive Governor of The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe. This comes at a time when the government is making deliberate efforts to re-position the Reserve Bank as the engine of Zimbabwe’s economic recovery. The Herald reports that Dr Mangudya will assume his reigns at his new no. 80 Samora Machel Ave offices effective 1 May for what could be the first of two five year terms.
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- governance, mobile finance
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Banks Outshine Agriculture, Manufacturing in GDP Input in Rwanda
Prime Minister Pierre-Damien Habumuremyi, yesterday, presented to both chambers of Parliament highlights of the performance of the service industry with focus on financial institutions, noting that the country is on course to achieving its targeted financial inclusion.
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African Crowdfunding platforms looking to emulate Kickstarter Success
Crowdfunding is hot right now, everybody knows that. You have all heard about Indiegogo and Kickstarter, the crowdfunding platforms that have played an integral part in the launching of a number of different ventures in America. Just yesterday, Facebook acquired Oculus Rift for $2B. Two years ago that same Oculus rift raised money to quickly develop their virtual reality gaming headset on Kickstarter, and now their owners are $2B richer. Hooray for crowdfunding!. A formal definition of crowdfunding would be, the process of raising money for an initiative through a large pool of backers. These backers are usually sourced through the internet.
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Claro to Launch ‘First’ Commercial NFC Mobile Payments in Latin America
The NFC-based service will work at more than 200,000 payment points in retail outlets when it launches in the first half of this year, according to the project’s vendor Giesecke & Devrient (G&D).
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Global MFI Investors Shift Focus from Asia to Africa
With the MFIs realigning their fund allocations, South Asia, the traditional microfinance hub, is facing challenge from Africa for the first time
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- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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- microfinance
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