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Announcing Our New Series: NextBillion’s Most Influential Articles
NextBillion runs our "Most Influential Articles" contest at the end of each year, in which we select 12 of our most-read articles from the previous year and invite readers to vote for their favorites. Since 2021 marked the 10th year of the contest, we're commemorating a full decade of thought-provoking analysis and opinion from entrepreneurs, investors, researchers and others in the emerging markets business and social enterprise sectors with a new series highlighting all of NextBillion’s Most Influential Articles from 2012 to today.
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- Agriculture, Coronavirus, Energy, Finance, Health Care, Impact Assessment, Investing, Social Enterprise, Technology
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Nigerian Fintech Startup Pivo Raises Funding from Microtraction
Nigerian startup Pivo, a credit-focused financial services company for SME players in the supply chain, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from early-stage VC firm Microtraction.
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- Finance
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Fairplay Closes $35 Million in Equity, Debt to Provide Revenue-Based Financing to Entrepreneurs in Latin America
Mexican revenue-based investment startup Fairplay secured $35 million in Series A funding to invest in the online marketing campaigns of direct-to-consumer e-commerce brands and marketplace sellers in Latin America.
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- Finance, Technology
- Region
- Latin America
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Making Financial Health a Global Reality: Four Strategic Directions for Increasing Customer-Centricity and Business Growth
Financial service providers that focus on improving their customer experience report growing revenue and greater profits. Yet as Pallavi Dhakal, Ankita Singh and Neha Kumar at UNCDF’s Centre for Financial Health point out, despite some notable progress, the financial services sector still has far to go to achieve customer-centricity – particularly in emerging markets. They share in-depth research that explores how providers in these markets can become more customer-centric by prioritizing financial health in their business strategy.
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- Finance
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Revenue-Based Financing Platform a55 Receives USD$16.3 Million Series B Investment Led by Movile to Accelerate Growth
a55, a leading revenue-based financing platform in Latin America, has received USD$16.3 million Series B investment led by Movile, a long-term investor and accelerator for LatAm tech companies.
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- Finance
- Region
- Latin America
- Tags
- blockchain, data, financial inclusion, fintech
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Savings-Led Digital Finance: The Dawn of a New Era?
The digital lending market surpassed $300 billion in 2020, with significant growth among emerging markets customers who access “instant loans” from their mobile phones. But according to Philip Acton and Finn Tiedemann at DreamStart Labs Inc., there are growing concerns about the risky practices used by some of these digital lenders. They argue that one solution may come from a new generation of “savings-led” digital finance apps that use clients' savings capacity as a proxy for their ability to repay loans – a development they describe as an important milestone in digital finance.
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- Finance, Technology
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Linking the Needs of Customers and Providers: A Framework for Effective Financial Health Measurement
Many financial service providers (FSPs) want to improve the financial health of their low-income users, but they often struggle to measure it. According to Nishant Kumar and Sonal Agrawal at Lakshya, one key challenge is that many FSPs don't see the business benefits of investing in financial health measurement. They share three principles that can help providers understand the distinct needs of different user groups, and develop a measurement methodology that links customers with interventions that impact their financial health – while boosting the FSPs' bottom line.
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- Finance, Impact Assessment
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Nigerian Ethical Credit-Recovery Fintech Bfree Secures $1.7 Million, Expands to Asia, Europe, South America and Across Africa
Bfree, a Nigerian credit management fintech, has embarked on global expansion after raising $1.7 million in a pre-Series A round.
- Categories
- Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa