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Financial Inclusion Week Starts Today – Here’s How You Can Participate
It's Financial Inclusion Week 2016 – a research and advocacy project that brings together nearly 40 organizations and stakeholders around the world to host events and share insights on advancing financial inclusion. This year, the conversations will focus on keeping clients first in a digital world, a theme which aims to bring clients to the forefront of the fintech discussion.
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- Uncategorized
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Is the Time Finally Ripe for Bitcoin Remittances in Africa?
When the words Bitcoin and Africa appear in a sentence, the word remittance usually follows. When Bitcoin first hit the mainstream in 2013, its low-cost money transfer feature was hailed as the solution to the overly expensive remittance costs charged by the large money transfer operators (MTOs), Western Union and MoneyGram. This is especially true when it comes to transferring funds to Africa.
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- Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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- fintech, remittances
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German Lender MyBucks Eyes Kenya Banking Licence in Race for Clients
German micro-lender, MyBucks, is eyeing a deposit-taking licence from the Central Bank of Kenya in a bid to grow its local clientele base.
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- Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Can mVisa Give Ecocash a Run for Its Money?
Mobile payments have become an increasingly important and viable option in Zimbabwe’s payments landscape due, in part, to the prevailing cash shortages and government’s quest to enhance financial inclusion.
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- Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
- Tags
- digital payments, fintech
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Mobile Money Meets Microcredit: Three Key Decisions in Taking a Concept from Design to Pilot
SAJIDA Foundation in Bangladesh is using evidence from data analytics, business case analysis and client research to improve cross-selling as part of the OPTIX project. Three key evidence-based programmatic decisions were necessary to take a new mobile financial service-based microfinance initiative from the design table to being piloted in the field.
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- Finance
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US Fed Explores Blockchain Use Cases With Industry Participants
The Federal Reserve has established a working group that is exploring financial innovation across the broad range of its responsibilities and engaging with industry stakeholders to discuss the ways in which the payment system could be improved considering the new wave of innovation including distributed ledger technology.
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- Technology
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- blockchain, fintech
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India Lags Peers in Its Bid Towards a Cashless Economy
The past couple of years have seen a number of initiatives to facilitate cashless transactions in the Indian economy, including the launch of the Unified Payment Interface (UPI) earlier this year. Such moves may raise the volume of cashless transactions in India in the years to come but the latest available internationally comparable data shows why moving towards a cashless economy remains a Herculean challenge for the country.
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- Technology
- Region
- South Asia
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- digital payments, fintech
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Microfinance: Your Inflexible Friend
ON A shelf in Buland Iqbal’s tiny roadside shop, cassette tapes are slowly turning pale in the sun. Nobody wants them these days, even in a dusty suburb in one of India’s poorest states. So Mr Iqbal has branched out. First he moved into renting DVDs, then, more boldly, into pay-television. A loan of 31,000 rupees ($465) from Sonata, a microfinance firm, helped him acquire a few satellite dishes and decoder boxes. It seems like a clear-cut success for microlending. In fact, Mr Iqbal’s loan illustrates why microlending does not work all that well, and how it needs to change.
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- Technology
- Tags
- fintech, microfinance
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