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Bitcoin to the Rescue in Venezuela?
Venezuela may not have much milk or toilet paper these days, but it does boast some of the latest cutting edge financial technologies. Bitcoin, the virtual currency system that sidesteps traditional banking intermediaries to conduct financial transactions, is increasingly becoming the payment method of choice for a group of Venezuelan entrepreneurs. Is this a vote of confidence for virtual currencies in developing countries? Or desperate times breeding financial innovation in a crumbling economy? Perhaps a bit of both.
- Categories
- Technology
- Region
- Latin America
- Tags
- fintech
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GSMA and Mobile Operators Launch Initiative to Extend Mobile Money and Mobile Internet to Women Globally
The GSMA today announced the launch of the Connected Women Commitment Initiative, aimed at reducing the mobile gender gap. Initial commitments by GSMA operator members, with over 75 million mobile internet and mobile money customers, will aim to connect millions more women in low- and middle-income countries by 20201. These operators will seek to increase the proportion of their female customers to support the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls. This builds on the 15 million women already benefiting from female-focused services offered by the GSMA’s Connected Women operator partners.
- Categories
- Technology
- Tags
- fintech
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GSMA Releases 2015 State of the Industry Report on Mobile Money
Mobile money has done more to extend the reach of financial services in the last decade than traditional “bricks and mortar” banking has in the last century.
- Categories
- Technology
- Tags
- fintech
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Africa’s Big Banks Are Betting on Fintech Startups and Bitcoin to Beat Disruption
African banks have been late to the fintech party, but after leaving huge swaths of the population to get their financial services from telcos(most famously Safaricom’s M-Pesa in Kenya), banks here are increasingly seeing the continent as a testing ground for new financial technologies like bitcoin and the blockchain.
- Categories
- Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
- Tags
- digital payments, fintech
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Vodafone Launches Real-Time M-Pesa Money Transfers
Vodafone and TransferTo, a company specializing in international airtime credit and mobile money transmissions, said Wednesday (Feb. 17) that they are working together to enable real-time global money transfers via M-Pesa Mobile Money accounts around the world.
- Categories
- Technology
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Major Telecoms Attain Financial Interoperability
Vodacom, the leading telecom in Tanzania is finally joining three others - Airtel, Tigo and Zantel - for subscribers to transfer money across multiple networks enabling the country achieve full interoperability.
- Categories
- Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Bangladesh Moving Toward Major Financial Inclusion Push
In a massive step, the government is going to expand digitalisation of financial transaction across the country and take it beyond the banking system.
- Categories
- Technology
- Region
- South Asia
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Peruvian Banks and Telcos Launch National Mobile Money Network
Five years in the making, Peru has launched a national mobile money network, with the aim of drawing five million of the country's unbanked into the formal banking system.
- Categories
- Technology
- Region
- Latin America
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