Group items tagged

Nigerian fintech startup Paga, poised for global expansion, has announced its acquisition of Apposit, a United States (US)-based technology company with operations in Ethiopia. Founded in 2009, Paga provides Nigerians with safe and convenient ways of making payments, allowing money to be sent to any phone number for the beneficiary to redeem at a Paga agent or at an ATM via a cardless withdrawal. Customers can also use Paga to deposit money to bank accounts in Nigeria, pay their bills, or top-up mobile phone airtime.

We live in a world of instant global communication. Yet the business of sending money abroad has remained stuck in the past. Many money transfer companies still make their customers visit an agent and fill-out bits of paper. And despite the inconvenience, their rates are often punishing.

WorldRemit, like other money transfer companies, has its upsides and downsides. However, based on customer experience and forum reviews, the pros outweigh the cons. Pros Easy to Use -It takes approximately 5 minutes to sign up for an account on WorldRemit and make a transfer.Extensive Global Reach -You can send money to 150 countries on the WorldRemit platform. Irrespective of where your loved ones are, you can rely on WorldRemit to deliver the money to them in 30,000+ agent locations globally.Reasonable Fees -Compared to other money transfer services, WorldRemit charges fair transfer fees. It allows you to independently handle third party fees thereby, giving you control of your transfer.Flexible Payment Options-You can choose to pay for your transfer using a credit card, a debit card or a bank transfer.Multiple Delivery Channels-The beneficiary can receive money through bank deposits, cash pickup or mobile money.

Founded in 2010 in the United Kingdom by Ismail Ahmed, an economics student at the University of London, WorldRemit has grown its geographical coverage quite fast. You can now send to 150 countries around the world with thousands of well-placed payout locations. However, the company still has ground to cover in terms of partnerships with financial institutions and mobile money companies to strengthen its global footprint.

WorldRemit is an online money transfer service that allows people to transfer money to their families in a secure, fast and affordable way.

Abacus is an online multi-asset class brokerage agent in Kenya. It is one of the few Fintech companies in Kenya that help local and international investors to access unit trusts, mutual funds, bonds, and stocks online. Through Abacus, Kenyans can save and invest in areas that give them the best returns for their money, without necessarily having access to a bank account.Abacus also builds mobile and web software platforms that help investors to access financial markets in Africa. The solutions it offers make it possible for people to research and invest online, anytime, anywhere. Because of the type of business it conducts, Abacus is licensed as a data vendor by Kenya’s Nairobi Securities Exchange.

For wealth management, Abacus is perhaps the most visible platform. The five-year-old NSE-licensed company offers users the ability to deposit, buy, sell, and trade unit trusts, bonds, and equities on their platform.Another startup is the earlier-mentioned Abojani which is an agent of AIB Capital for the purchase of local stocks. Founded in 2018, Abojani claims to have up to KES 40 Mn (roughly USD 400 K) under management for 150 clients in both stocks and mutual funds, as its CEO revealed to WeeTracker.Other platforms for wealth management in Kenya are Britam Asset Managers for mutual funds and Scope Markets for offshore stocks via Contract for Difference (CFD).

M-Pesa has 20.5 million customers across a network of 176,000 agents and generates around one-fourth ($531 million) of Safaricom’s ≈ $2.2 billion annual revenues (2018). The company has held nearly 75% of the mobile-money market share in Kenya for nearly a decade and the country has the highest mobile-money usage rates in Africa.

M-Pesa “grew at a blistering pace following its inception in 2007.” [1] In less than two years from its launch, M-Pesa had become the leading money transfer method in the country, with over 50 percent of people sending money via M-Pesa and over 65 percent receiving funds through the system in 2009. By 2015 there were 19.9 million active M-Pesa users, up 18 percent from 2013/14. It is said that 43 percent of Kenya's GDP flowed through M-Pesa, with over 237 million person-to-person transactions.

M-Pesa is an SMS-based system that enables users to deposit, send and withdraw funds using their mobile phone. Customers do not need to have a bank account and can transact at any of the country's 40,000 agent outlets. Registration and deposits are free and pricing for most other transactions is based on a tiered structure to allow even the lowest-income users to use the system. Transaction values are typically small, ranging from US$5 to US$30.

AgroCenta brings the shareholders in Ghana’s agricultural value chain under one umbrella. Focusing on the producers, rural smallholder farmers, the company has developed a web and mobile platform that provides rural farmers with a suite of services to empower them to sell their crops at fair-market prices. AgroCenta’s platform, which is includes SMS functionality, provides the following services: 1) AgroInfo: real-time commodity pricing information; 2) TruckR: an on-demand logistics solution; 3) AgroTrade: a market platform to offer crops for sale; and 4) AgroPay: a mobile-money based payments service. The company markets its platform leveraging an intimate knowledge of the African cultural context and recruiting and technologically empowering village chiefs to act as advocates or agents for the platform.

“We are excited to partner with Visa, a leader in payments globally, as they are constantly building world-class solutions for consumers and businesses. Our goals are well-aligned. As we scale our wallet across emerging markets such as Nigeria, Mexico and Ethiopia, partnering with Visa to give both consumers and businesses, who have been underserved, access to Visa’s global network made sense to us,” the company said in a press release.

Each and every transaction done on the M-PESA platform is electronic and can therefore be monitored by Safaricom, which runs its own bank-grade anti-money laundering system. Even a cash-in or a cash-out operation has an electronic leg and is captured by the system. The Central Bank of Kenya gets regular reports on M-PESA transactions, as it does from other payment service providers.

Cash merchants are mainly super users, who resell their own working capital balances, with no more access to the M-PESA platform than any other customers, except that they have higher transaction limits.

M-Pesa is Africa's most successful mobile money service and the region’s largest fintech platform. M-Pesa is the preferred way to make payments across the continent both for the banked and unbanked due to its safety and unmatched convenience.

It also provides financial services to millions of people who have mobile phones, but do not have bank accounts, or only have limited access to banking services. Now, M-Pesa provides over 42 million people with a safe, secure and affordable way to send and receive money, top-up airtime, make bill payments, receive salaries, get short-term loans and much more.

In early 2020, Vodacom & Safaricom completed the acquisition of the M-Pesa brand from Vodafone Group through a newly created joint venture. The joint venture will accelerate the growth of M-Pesa through Africa by giving both Vodacom and Safaricom full control of the M-Pesa brand, product development and support services as well as the opportunity to expand M-Pesa into new African markets

BelCash Technology Solution PLC has partnered with two banks to launch HelloCash mobile money services in Ethiopia. Launched in partnership with Lion International Bank and Somali Micro Finance, the service will provide financial services to all Ethiopians

BelCash Technology Solution PLC has partnered with two banks to launch HelloCash mobile money services in Ethiopia. Launched in partnership with Lion International Bank and Somali Micro Finance, the service will provide financial services to all Ethiopians. It will enable existing and potential customers of Lion International Bank and Somali Micro Finance to carry out transactions in four key areas of financial transactions: Deposit, Withdraw, Transfer and make payments.

Key standouts of HelloCash include its interoperability and shared infrastructure features. The system is designed for multiple banks and MFIs to be interconnected and offer mobile money services to their respective customers. This allows partnering financial institutions to share each other’s agent and branch networks to serve each other’s customers.

The generation of wealth, sustained by productive activities of agro-industries, leads to the production of wastes and uses natural resources, interfering in the environmental pillar of sustainability. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether cassava processing companies generate eco-innovations by means of technological cooperation, and the degree of participation of agents in these interactions. The quantitative method used the structural equation modeling for data analyses. The results indicated a relationship between technological cooperation and the generation of eco-innovation. The model developed showed the significance between variables and exposed the main aspects that generate eco-innovation from technological cooperation. A cooperation process allows a reduction in the burning of fossil fuels, reducing the emission of methane gas, which aggravates the greenhouse effect, also reducing odor, and ultimately, providing financial gains to agribusiness.

Visa has entered a partnership with Nigeria based startup Paga on payments and technology.Founded in Lagos, Paga scaled its fintech business in West Africa, before targeting expansion in Ethiopia and Mexico.The startup has created a multi-channel network for over 14 million customers in Nigeria to transfer money, pay-bills and buy things digitally through its mobile-app or 24,840 agents.The new arrangement allows Paga account holders to transact on Visa’s global network. It will also see both companies work together on tech.The collaboration reflects a strategy of the American financial services giant to expand in Africa working with the continent’s top startups.

pdated: January 16, 2021Most viewed in 2019​Belcash is a mobile-based financial solution platform provider to financial institutions. The HelloCash solution enables existing and potential customers of the financial institutions to carry out transactions in four key areas of financial transactions: deposits, withdrawals, transfers and payments. It allows customers of partnering banks to visit any agent or branch to utilise financial services, regardless of which bank the customer belongs to.

M-Pesa, the mobile money service success story that began in Kenya in 2007 is continuing its march, this time into the surprising location of Romania, raising the questions, what will the product look like in this new European market and how will it fare. At the end of last month Vodafone, the operator behind the new service and one of Romania’s largest telcos, began operations using the country’s 300 Vodafone Romania stores, participating retail outlets, and authorized agents.