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Why mPesa will not be an instant hit in Nigeria
Having since expanded to 10 additional countries within and outside (Albania, Romania, Afghanistan and India) the African continent, mPesa has grown to a platform with over 29.5 million active customers and 287,400 agents. In 2016 alone, it processed about 6 billion transactions, at a peak rate of 529 transactions per second.
- Categories
- Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Inclusive Fintech: Four Lessons for Optimizing Customer and Tech Journeys
Catalyst Fund – a unique accelerator model that provides direct and tailored technical assistance to complement a startup’s skill sets – spent the past year working directly with early-stage fintech businesses in emerging markets. Here are some of the lessons they gathered, both on the tech side and the customer side. A key takeaway: Trust is slowly built but easily destroyed.
- Categories
- Finance, Technology
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Why India needs to work on financial literacy now more than ever
India is home to 17.5% of the world’s population but nearly 76% of its adult population does not understand even the basic financial concepts. Empirical evidence shows that digital efforts on financial education have had a far greater impact than the traditional media.
- Categories
- Uncategorized
- Region
- South Asia
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Announcing NextBillion Financial Health: New Partnership with MetLife Foundation Reflects the Evolution of Financial Inclusion
NextBillion is officially re-launching our Financial Innovation site with a new name and partner. The site will now be called Financial Health, and it’s being sponsored by MetLife Foundation. The Foundation shares our concept of how the new NextBillion Financial Health site can best serve our readers: By providing a platform for sharing insights, data, and analysis through articles that ask the big question of what works – and what doesn't – in the movement to help more people use financial services to improve the quality of their lives.
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- Uncategorized
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Financial Inclusion Takes the Next Step: An Interview with MetLife Foundation President Dennis White
As NextBillion launches our new Financial Health site under the sponsorship of MetLife Foundation, we touched base with its president and CEO, Dennis White. In this wide-ranging interview, White discusses the evolution of the financial inclusion movement, and the work the foundation is doing to advance it – including its grant-making and investing approach, its ongoing challenges, and what it has learned from both success and failure, among other issues.
- Categories
- Finance
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Inter-American Development Bank Grants Colombia $450 Million USD Loan for Financial System Reforms
According to the IDB, the proposed reforms will aim to solidify macroeconomic stability, boost development, encourage public/private partnership financing, strengthen regulation of the financial system, promote financial inclusion, and heighten the country’s ability to monitor progress in these areas.
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- Uncategorized
- Region
- Latin America
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Lessons Learned Using Mobile Tools to Compile Financial Diary Data
Financial diary methodology is a powerful tool for studying financial inclusion, especially if digital tools are used. Using a mobile data collection and analysis app (which also worked offline) and a cloud-hosted database, Catholic Relief Services drew household data from rural areas in real time and amassed thousands of data points generated by tracking people’s financial lives each week.
- Categories
- Finance, Technology
- Tags
- data, financial inclusion, fintech, research
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UN Study: Digitization of Kenyan Farmer Payments Helps Tackle Poverty
One Acre Fund, supported by Citi, enabled farmers to easily make loan repayments via mobile money instead of cash, reducing the uncertainty, inefficiency, insecurity and high costs previously caused by cash transactions.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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