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Does Facebook Need A Humanitarian Partner For Its New Digital Currency?
Libra, according to its website, wants to "reinvent" money by making a financial transaction as cheap and simple as "sending a text message or sharing a photo."
- Categories
- Finance, Technology
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Small Change: Why Behavioral Science Needs to Go Beyond ‘Nudges’ to Make a Real Impact
Behavioral science – the practice of leveraging human tendencies to produce desired outcomes – has become popular in the social sector. In particular, "nudges" – small changes that subtly encourage better behaviors – are often seen as a solution for everything from weight loss to financial health. But Mariel Beasley, co-founder of the behavioral science group Common Cents Lab, shares an uncomfortable truth: Small tweaks usually mean marginal changes, and half-measures like nudges are leaving most of the potential of behavioral science untapped.
- Categories
- Finance
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Melinda Gates Pushes G7 to Close Digital Gender Gap in Africa
G7 finance ministers meeting in France are to endorse a paper from the Gates Foundation saying there is a serious risk that digital technology and mobile banking will bypass millions of women in Africa, leaving them disempowered for a generation.
- Categories
- Finance, Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Big Data, Big Opportunity: Is Data Science the Key to Universal Energy Access?
Rural dwellers at the base of the pyramid are living largely "data-less," un-digitalized lives – but that's changing quickly with the spread of pay-as-you-go energy and the financial access it enables. In spite of the dangers of wrongly screening out customers as potential credit risks, denying them both further electrification prospects and access to credit, Guilhem Dupuy of GAIA Impact Fund and Thibault Lesueur of Solaris Offgrid take an optimistic view. They discuss why new off-grid energy data is an opportunity for increased investment, industry growth and economic justice.
- Categories
- Energy, Technology
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Singapore’s CredoLab to Power Digital Financial Inclusion in Sub-Saharan Africa
CredoLab’s alternative credit scoring solution comes at a critical juncture in the region’s focus on financial inclusion.
- Categories
- Finance
- Region
- Asia Pacific
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Why Payment Fraud is a Critical Threat to Financial Inclusion – And How Mojaloop is Making it Worse
The next key step in financial inclusion is payment interoperability, in which digital finance providers’ networks are connected to enable transactions between users of different systems. But though interoperability has major potential for the sector, it also comes with huge risks, says Clear Purchase founder Nick Brown, an expert in payment infrastructure. He explains why a massive payment fraud attack could do substantial and long-lasting damage to the financial inclusion movement, and how an open-source platform like the Gates Foundation's Mojaloop increases the risk.
- Categories
- Finance, Technology
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Bank of Ghana Asks Mobile Money Operators to Reduce the High Cost of Services
The Bank of Ghana (BoG) has urged mobile money operators to reduce the cost involved in the transaction of business on the mobile money platform.
- Categories
- Finance
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Report: Countries are Broadly Embracing the Opportunities of Fintech to Boost Economic Growth and Inclusion
Financial inclusion is one of the core themes throughout the document. Hundreds of millions of individuals are underbanked or simply unbanked around the world. Fintech can streamline the process in providing fully featured services to these underserved communities.
- Categories
- Finance
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