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Women Worldwide Struggle to Access Banking Services. Bitcoin Is Only Making That Worse
Blockchain technology is currently being used to distribute aid to 100,000 Syrian refugeesby The World Food Programme. And plans for future blockchain initiatives within the U.N. alone run from ending child trafficking to providing services for women and girls in humanitarian settings.
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- Finance
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Viewpoint: What developing countries can teach America about banking
For many, the inability to even get to a physical branch — bank branches are highly concentrated in urban areas — means that they don't have access to banking services at all. As a result, about 6.5% of American households still don't have a bank account, while another 18.7% are "underbanked" — they have an account, but also use check-cashing or payday loans. In all, over 60 million adults are unbanked or "underbanked" in this country.
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- Finance
- Region
- North America
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Press release: New Report Shows Creating Financial Access for Immigrants & Underserved Entrepreneurs Increases Credit Scores and Leads to Job Creation
Opportunity Fund research shows microlending to immigrant and underserved entrepreneurs in California creates a path into the mainstream economy for borrowers and leads to job creation and economic activity in communities.
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- Press release
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- Finance
- Region
- North America
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Viewpoint: Designing financial products for women
Current financial service models conflate women with ‘family’, considering them merely an avenue to pursue social welfare.
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- Finance
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Creating a Culture of Innovation By Letting Employees Lead the Way
For nearly 30 years, Pro Mujer has been a regional leader in Latin America – not only in microfinance, but in women’s empowerment. But facing an evolving landscape with emerging technologies and new market participants, the organization realized that it needed to develop a more innovative approach. As it considered how to establish a culture of innovation, Pro Mujer turned to a surprising (yet intuitive) resource: its employees. Cassandra Salcedo, Associate Director of Strategy and Innovation at Pro Mujer, shares five key lessons the organization learned from the process.
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- Finance, Technology
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Report: Over 8 of 10 Small Banks, Microlenders and Co-Ops in the Philippines are Not Ready to Go Digital
“The dominant picture in our data is that majority of financial institutions are not yet ready to transform their business at this point, confirming anecdotal evidence long held by the industry,” wrote FINTQ in the report. “This conclusion indeed raises a notch higher the urgency in enabling financial institutions to be digitally ready, as the pattern uncovered in our data has profound implications on the country’s progress towards expanding financial inclusion in the countryside.”
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- Finance
- Region
- Asia Pacific
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Press release: Tez Financial Services Becomes the First Pakistani Startup to Raise $1.1 Million in Seed Round Led by Omidyar Network
"Our aim is to become the primary financial service provider for the unbanked and underbanked in Pakistan," said Nadeem Hussain, co-founder and CEO of Tez, who has more than 30 years of experience in the global financial services industry.
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- Finance
- Region
- South Asia
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Gates Foundation Partners Ripple and Coil in Financial Inclusion Initiative
Other than implementing Ripple’s Interledger Protocol, ways of using open source payments software MojaLoop to enable disbursement systems geared towards the poor will be explored. Gates Foundation provided the funding which financed the development of MojaLoop (which borrows the Swahili word Moja, meaning one).
- Categories
- Finance, Technology
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