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New York’s Giant Pension Fund Doubles Climate-Smart Investment
The $2 billion boost was announced at the Investors Summit on Climate Risk, where top fund managers discussed finance for a low-carbon, clean energy future.
- Categories
- Environment, Investing
- Region
- North America
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India’s Payment Banks: A Reality Check
The idea of financial inclusion, particularly in developing markets, has always met with challenges pertaining to accessibility and affordability. The RBI and the Government have tackled these challenges in numerous ways and have made substantial progress, but problems remain in reaching out to those who are most vulnerable, namely, the illiterate, low-income and rural population.
- Region
- South Asia
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Kenya: Mobile money interoperability to launch in March 2018
Interoperability will also present consumers with choices of services and not being locked into one service or mobile network, given how costly it has been to transfer money between mobile money services.
- Categories
- Finance
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Digital transactions on the rise in India – but fall drastically short of 25-billion target
Only about 14.8 billion digital transactions were undertaken across India from April 1 to January 28, show data sourced from the ministry of electronics and IT (MeitY). This includes bank-to-bank electronic money transfers, digital wallet payments, Aadhaar-based and electronic toll payments.
- Categories
- Finance
- Region
- South Asia
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Indonesia’s Fintech Lending Boom Exploits Shortfall in Bank Loans
The emergence of these peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platforms has so far been welcomed by Indonesia's financial regulators which see them as offering a much needed service to cash-strapped businesses and consumers at a time when Southeast Asia's biggest economy has been hobbled by sluggish bank lending.
- Region
- Asia Pacific
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How microcredit can help poor countries after natural disasters
BOTH, in different ways, worry about liquidity. And global warming may, indeed, be bringing meteorologists and financiers together. On January 18th, VisionFund, a microlending charity, and Global Parametrics, a venture that crunches climate and seismic data, launched what they billed as the “world’s largest non-governmental climate-insurance programme”. The scheme will offer microfinance to about 4m people across six countries in Asia and Africa affected by climate-change-related calamities.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Environment
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India’s flourishing fintech sector is craving the finance minister’s attention
While the Narendra Modi government and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) have already laid down regulations for certain segments, such as peer-to-peer lending, others like cryptocurrencies and online lending startups are yet to be regulated. Such regulation may mean stricter compliance, but the management at these firms believe it will lend legitimacy to the industry, which is expected to be worth $2.4 billion by 2020. That, in turn, will help them grow faster.
- Categories
- Finance
- Region
- South Asia
- Tags
- cryptocurrency, fintech, regulations
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Grameen America Celebrates 10 Years of Empowering Women through Microfinance as it Announces Foray into Impact Investing
Previously, Grameen America had been funded largely by traditional philanthropy and concessionary capital from foundations, charitable organizations, individual investors, and commercial lenders. The organization’s adoption of impact investing as an additional means of funding comes at a time when impact investing—defined by the Global Impact Investing Network as “investments made into companies, organizations, and funds with the intention to generate social and environmental impact alongside a financial return”—is on the rise.
- Categories
- Investing
- Region
- North America