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Mobile Wallets in India to Start Offering Small Amounts on Short-Term Credit
Your mobile wallet, which has been serving your need for instant cash in an electronic form for sundry transactions, will also empower you further with companies in the business planning to add an instant loan facility to their offerings.
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- Technology
- Region
- South Asia
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Want to Serve the World’s Poorest Citizens? Take Your Company Public in India
For the last 15 years or so, there has been lots of hype about “business models” that will alleviate global poverty while turning a profit. It was a premise derived from the success of the microfinance industry in providing credit to some of the poorest people in the world, who, contrary to conventional wisdom, had a higher repayment rate than the typical borrower. As the late Dr. CK Prahalad hypothesized in his landmark book, “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid”, there are several strategies that organizations fighting global poverty need to master – and that those capabilities are in abundance in the private sector. They are better at marketing. They are better at R&D and understanding price points. And they are good at partnerships when it serves their purposes. The public and non-profit sectors, alternatively, are generally not very good at any of these things.
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- Uncategorized
- Region
- South Asia
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Half of Mobile Money Accounts Inactive in Bangladesh
More than half of mobile money accounts have gone inactive, with the number rising every month, according to data from Bangladesh Bank.
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- Technology
- Region
- South Asia
- Tags
- fintech
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E-wallet Companies Struggle in India, as Initial Euphoria Dies Down
After a flurry of activity with almost two dozen companies launching prepaid wallets in the last couple of years, the initial euphoria around wallets may be dying down. Many players — with the exception of dominant Paytm or -owned Freecharge — concede that the numbers of wallet users is stagnating and companies are struggling to get existing users to transact more using their digital money.
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- Technology
- Region
- South Asia
- Tags
- digital payments, fintech
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In China’s Tougher Drug Market, Minnows Open Back Door for ‘Big Pharma’
Armed with Beijing funds and friends in the right places, Chinese drug minnows are thriving, luring money from 'Big Pharma' majors struggling to restore the strong growth they once enjoyed in the world's second-largest medicine market.
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- Health Care
- Region
- South Asia
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UBS Cancer Fund Shows Power of Impact Investing
UBS Wealth Management is proving investors in Asia will warm to funding projects with social and environmental benefits if the potential returns deliver.
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- Environment, Investing
- Region
- South Asia
- Tags
- impact investing
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How Social Entrepreneurship Is Making a Difference in the World
We have grown accustomed to the Silicon Valley zeal driving startups to develop new technologies that will disrupt the market in yet another way.
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- Technology
- Region
- South Asia
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Closing the Gap on Vaccine Efficacy in the ‘Global South’
Vaccines and antibiotics occupy a privileged position in the history of medicine. They are humanity’s “magic bullets” — categories of intervention so effective and easy to deliver that they have the capacity to single-handedly eradicate entire diseases from human history. But just as the heady utopia of an antibiotic age has given way to the cold, evolutionary reality of antibiotic resistance, we must now also confront the pervasive problem of vaccine failure in the global South.
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- Health Care
- Region
- South Asia
- Tags
- vaccines